The Hidden History of Zionism
(1988)
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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|
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
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|
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 absentee
feudal landowners who sold off their landholdings and evicted the Palestinian
peasants who had worked the land
6.
The evasiveness of the Mandatory government about its intentions
regarding Palestinian sovereignty.
The national movement
consisted of the urban bourgeoisie, feudal landowners, religious leaders and
representatives of peasants and workers.
Its demands were:
1.
An immediate stop to Zionist immigration
2.
Cessation and prohibition of the transfer of the ownership of Arab lands
to Zionist colonists
3.
The establishment of a democratic government in which Palestinians would
have the controlling voice. [36]
Analysis of the Revolt
Ghassan Kanafani
described the uprising:
The real cause of the
revolt was the fact that the acute conflict involved in the transformation of Palestinian
society from an Arab agricultural-feudal-clerical one into a Jewish (Western)
industrial bourgeois one, had reached its climax. ...The process of
establishing the roots of colonialism and transforming it from a British
mandate into Zionist settler colonialism ...reached its climax in the
mid-thirties, and in fact the leadership of the Palestinian nationalist
movement was obliged to adopt a certain form of armed struggle because it was
no longer able to exercise its leadership at a time when the conflict had
reached decisive proportions. [37]
The failure of the Mufti
and other religious leaders, of feudal land owners and the nascent bourgeoisie
to support the peasants and workers to the end, enabled the colonial regime and
the Zionists to crush the rebellion after three years of heroic struggle. In
this the British were aided decisively by the treachery of the traditional Arab
regimes, who were dependent upon their colonial sponsors.
The Palestinian national struggle
has been continuous since 1918 and has been accompanied by one or another form
of organized armed resistance. It has also included civil disobedience, general
strikes, nonpayment of taxes, refusal to carry identity cards, boycotts and
demonstrations.
NOTES
32. Sami Hadawi, Bitter
Harvest (Delmar, N.Y.: The Caravan Books, 1979), pp.43-44.
33. Ghassan Kanafani, The
1936-1939 Revolt in Palestine (New York, Committee for a Democratic
Palestine).
34. Ibid.,
p.96.
35. Ibid.,
p.39.
36. Ibid.,
p.31.
37. Ibid.
Chapter 4
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|
In 1947, there were
630,000 Jews and 1,300,000 Palestinian Arabs. Thus, by the time of the United
Nations partition of Palestine in 1947, the Jews were 31% of the
population.[38]
The decision to partition
Palestine, promoted by the leading imperialist powers and Stalin’s Soviet
Union, gave 54% of the fertile land to the Zionist movement. But before the
state of Israel was established, the Irgun and Haganah seized three-quarters of
the land and expelled virtually all the inhabitants.
In 1948, there were 475 Palestinian
villages and towns. Of these, 385 were razed to the ground, reduced to rubble.
Ninety remain, stripped of their land.
Removing the Mask
In 1940, Joseph Weitz,
the head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonization Department, which was responsible
for the actual organization of settlements in Palestine, wrote:
Between ourselves it must
be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country. We
shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in this small country. There is no
other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries - all
of them. Not one village, not one tribe should be left. [39]
Joseph Weitz elaborated
upon the practical meaning of rendering Palestine "Jewish":
There are some who
believe that the non-Jewish population, even in a high percentage, within our
borders will be more effectively under our surveillance; and there are some who
believe the contrary, i.e., that it is easier to carry out surveillance over
the activities of a neighbor than over those of a tenant. [I] tend to support
the latter view and have an additional argument: ... the need to sustain the
character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish ... with a non-Jewish
minority limited to fifteen percent. I had already reached this fundamental
position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary. [40]
The "Koenig
Report" stated this policy even more bluntly:
We must use terror,
assassination, intimidation, land confiscation and the cutting of all social
services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population. [41]
Chairman Heilbrun of the
Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv,
declaimed: "We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned
to live here as slaves." [42]
These are the words of
Uri Lubrani, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion’s special adviser on Arab
Affairs, in 1960: "We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of
woodcutters and waiters." [43]
Raphael Eitan, Chief of
Staff of the Israeli Armed Forces stated:
We declare openly that
the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel ...
Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force
until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours. [44]
Eitan elaborated before
the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee:
When we have settled the
land, all the Arabs will be able to do will be to scurry around like drugged
roaches in a bottle. [45]
Ben Gurion and the Final Aim
The territorial ambitions
of Zionism were clearly spelled out by David Ben Gurion in a speech to a
Zionist meeting on October 13, 1936: "We do not suggest that we announce
now our final aim which is far reaching - even more so than the Revisionists
who oppose Partition. I am unwilling to abandon the great vision, the final
vision which is an organic, spiritual and ideological component of my ...
Zionist aspirations." [46]
In the same year, Ben
Gurion wrote in a letter to his son:
A partial Jewish State is
not the end, but only the beginning. I am certain that we can not be prevented
from settling in the other parts of the country and the region.
In 1937, he declaimed:
"The boundaries of
Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor
will be able to limit them." [47] In 1938, he was more explicit: "The
boundaries of Zionist aspiration," he told the World Council of Poale Zion
in Tel Aviv, "include southern Lebanon, southern Syria, today’s Jordan,
all of Cis-Jordan [West Bank] and the Sinai." [48]
Ben Gurion formulated
Zionist strategy very clearly:
After we become a strong
force as the result of the creation of the state, we shall abolish partition
and expand to the whole of Palestine. The state will only be a stage in the
realization of Zionism and its task is to prepare the ground for our expansion.
The state will have to preserve order - not by preaching but with machine guns.
[49]
In May of 1948 he
presented his strategic aims to the General Staff. "We should prepare to
go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria.
The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us
to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will
smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then
bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria, and Sinai." [50]
When General Yigal Allon asked Ben
Gurion, "What is to be done with the population of Lydda and Ramle?"
- some 50,000 inhabitants - Ben Gurion, according to his biographer, waved his
hand and said, "Drive them out!" [51]
Yitzhak Rabin, the current Defense
Minister, carried out this edict. In Lydda and Ramle, no remnants of
Palestinian dwellings remain. Today this area is occupied entirely by the
Jewish settler population. Michael Bar Zohar, in his biography of David Ben
Gurion, describes Ben Gurion’s first visit to Nazareth. "Ben Gurion looked
around in astonishment and said, ’Why are there so many Arabs, why didn’t you
drive them out?’”
The Palestinians were indeed driven
out. Between November 29, 1947, when the United Nations partitioned Palestine,
and May 15, 1948, when the State was formally proclaimed, the Zionist army and
militia had seized 75% of Palestine, forcing 780,000 Palestinians out of the
country.
The Butchery Begins: Deir Yasin
The process was one of
sustained slaughter as village after village was wiped out. The killing was
intended to cause people to flee for their lives.
The commander of the Haganah, Zvi
Ankori, described what happened: "I saw cut off genitalia and women’s
crushed stomachs ... It was direct murder." [52]
Menachem Begin gloated over the
impact throughout Palestine of the Nazi-like operations he commanded at Deir
Yasin. Lehi and IZL Commandos stormed the village of Deir Yasin on April 9, 1948,
slaughtering 254 men, women and children.
A legend of terror spread
amongst Arabs who were seized with panic at the mention of our Irgun soldiers.
It was worth half a dozen battalions to the forces of Israel. Arabs throughout
the country ... were seized with limitless panic and started to flee for their
lives. This mass flight soon developed into a maddened, uncontrollable
stampede. Of the 800,000 Arabs who lived on the present territory of the state
of Israel, only some 165,000 are still there. The political and economic
significance of this development can hardly be overestimated. [53
The implementation of
this program was carried out in part by Menachem Begin and in part by his
future successor as Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, as military commanders of
the Irgun and the Lohamei Herut Israel (Lehi), i.e., Fighters for the Freedom
of Israel. Inhabitants were force marched in blood-soaked clothing through the
streets of Jerusalem to jeering on-lookers, before disappearing.
Eyewitness Accounts
The eyewitness accounts
of these events foreshadowed the fate of the Palestinian people.
It was noon when the
battle ended and the shooting stopped. Things had become quiet, but the village
had not surrendered. The IZL (Irgun) and Lehi (Stern Gang) irregulars left the
places in which they had been hiding and started carrying out clean-up
operations in the houses. They fired with all the arms they had, and threw
explosives into the buildings. They also shot everyone they saw in the houses,
including women and children - indeed the commanders made no attempt to check
the disgraceful acts of slaughter. I myself and a number of inhabitants begged
the commanders to give orders to their men to stop shooting, but our efforts
were unsuccessful. In the meantime, some twenty-five men had been brought out
of the houses: they were loaded into a freight truck and led in a ’victory
parade,’ like a Roman triumph, through to Mahaneh Yehudah and Zikhron Yosef
quarters [of Jerusalem]. At the end of the parade they were taken to a stone
quarry between Giv’at Shaul and Deir Yasin and shot in cold blood. The fighters
then put the women and children who were still alive on a truck and took them
to the Mandelbaum Gate. [54]
The director of the
International Red Cross in Palestine, Jacques de Reynier, attempted to
intervene as word of the slaughter spread. His personal testimony is as
follows:
... The Commander of the
Irgun detachment did not seem willing to receive me. At last he arrived, young,
distinguished, and perfectly correct, but there was a peculiar glitter in his
eyes, cold and cruel. According to him the Irgun had arrived twenty-four hours
earlier and ordered the inhabitants by loudspeaker to evacuate all houses and
surrender: the time given to obey the order was a quarter of an hour. Some of
these miserable people had come forward and were taken prisoner, to be released
later in the direction of the Arab lines. The rest, not having obeyed the
order, had met the fate they deserved. But there was no point in exaggerating
things, there were only a few dead, and they would be buried as soon as the
“clean-up” of the village was over. If I found any bodies, I could take them,
but there were certainly no wounded.
This account made my blood run
cold. I went back to the Jerusalem road and got an ambulance and a truck that I
had alerted through the Red Shield ... I reached the village with my convoy,
and the firing stopped. The gang (Irgun) was wearing uniforms with helmets. All
of them were young, some even adolescents, men and women, armed to the teeth:
revolvers, machine-guns, hand grenades, and also cutlasses in their hands, most
of them still blood-stained. A beautiful young girl with criminal eyes showed
me hers, still dripping with blood; she displayed it like a trophy. This was
the “clean-up” team, that was obviously performing its task very
conscientiously.
I tried to go into a house. A dozen
soldiers surrounded me, their machine-guns aimed at my body, and their officer
forbade me to move. The dead, if any, would be brought to me, he said. I then
flew into one of the most towering rages of my life, telling these criminals
what I thought of their conduct, threatening them with everything I could think
of, and then pushed them aside and went into the house.
The first room was dark, everything
was in disorder, but there was no one. In the second, amid disembowelled
furniture and all sorts of debris, I found some bodies, cold. Here the
“clean-up” had been done with machine guns, then hand grenades. It had been
finished off with knives, anyone could see that. The same thing in the next
room, but as I was about to leave, I heard something like a sigh. I looked
everywhere, turned over all the bodies, and eventually found a little foot,
still warm. It was a little girl of ten, mutilated by a hand grenade, but still
alive ... everywhere it was the same horrible sight ... there had been four
hundred people in this village; about fifty of them had escaped and were still
alive. All the rest had been deliberately massacred in cold blood for, as I observed
for myself, this gang was admirably disciplined and only acted under orders.
After another visit to Deir Yasin I
went back to my office where I was visited by two gentlemen, well-dressed in
civilian clothes, who had been waiting for me for more than an hour. They were
the commander of the Irgun detachment and his aide. They had prepared a paper
which they wanted me to sign. It was a statement to the effect that I had been
very courteously received by them, and obtained all the facilities I had
requested, in the accomplishment of my mission, and thanking them for the help
I had received. As I showed signs of hesitation and even started to argue with
them, they said that if I valued my life, I had better sign immediately. The
only course open to me was to convince them that I did not value my life in the
least. [55]
The Slaughter at Dueima
If the Deir Yasin
massacre was carried out by the "rightist" Revisionist Zionist
underground organizations, IZL and Lehi, like massacres occurred on a similar
scale throughout the country. The massacre at Dueima in 1948 was perpetrated by
the official Labor Zionist Israeli army, the Israel Defense Forces (Tzeva
Haganah le-Israel or ZAHAL). The account of the massacre, as described by a
soldier who participated in the horror, was published in Davar,
the official Hebrew daily newspaper of the Labor-Zionist-run Histadrut General
Federation of Workers:
... They killed between
eighty to one hundred Arab men, women and children. To kill the children they
[soldiers] fractured their heads with sticks. There was not one home without
corpses. The men and women of the villages were pushed into houses without food
or water. Then the saboteurs came to dynamite them.
One commander ordered a soldier to
bring two women into a building he was about to blow up ... Another soldier
prided himself upon having raped an Arab woman before shooting her to death.
Another Arab woman with her newborn baby was made to clean the place for a
couple of days, and then they shot her and the baby. Educated and well-mannered
commanders who were considered “good guys” ... became base murderers, and this
not in the storm of battle, but as a method of expulsion and extermination. The
fewer the Arabs who remain, the better. [56]
The strategic value of
the Deir Yasin massacre would be propounded widely over the years by Zionist
leaders such as Eldad [Scheib] who, with Yitzhak Shamir and Nathan Yalin-Mor
[Feldman], were in charge of Lehi. Speaking at a meeting in July 1967, his
remarks were published in the well-known journal of opinion, De’ot,
in Winter 1968:
I have always said that
if the deepest and profoundest hope symbolizing redemption is the rebuilding of
the [Jewish] Temple ... then it is obvious that those mosques [al-Haram
al-Sharif and al-Aqsa] will have, one way or another, to disappear one of these
days ... Had it not been for Deir Yasin, half a million Arabs would be living
in the state of Israel [in 1948]. The state of Israel would not have existed.
We must not disregard this, with full awareness of the responsibility involved.
All wars are cruel. There is no way out of that. This country will either be
Eretz Israel with an absolute Jewish majority and a small Arab minority, or
Eretz Ishmael, and Jewish emigration will begin again if we do not expel the Arabs
one way or another. [57]
Murder in Gaza
The program of massacre
did not end with the formation of the state. Meir Har Tzion’s diary describes
the massacres in the refugee camps and villages of Gaza during the early
1950’s:
The wide, dry riverbed
glitters in the moonlight. We advance, carefully, along the mountain slope.
Several houses can be seen ... In the distance we can see three lights and hear
the sounds of Arab music coming out of the homes immersed in darkness. We split
up into three groups of four men each. Two groups make their way to the immense
refugee camp (Al Burj) to the south of our position. The other group marches
toward the lonely house in the flat area north of Wadi Gaza. We march forward,
trampling over green fields, wading through water canals as the moon bathes us
in its scintillating light. Soon, however, the silence will be shattered by
bullets, explosions, and the screams of those who are now sleeping peacefully.
We advance quickly and enter one of the houses - “Mann Haatha?” [Arabic
for “Who’s there?”]
We leap towards the voices. Fearing
and trembling, two Arabs are standing up against the wall of the building. They
try to escape. I open fire. An ear-piercing scream fills the air. One man falls
to the ground while his friend continues to run. Now we must act - we have no
time to lose. We make our way from house to house as the Arabs scramble about
in confusion.
Machine guns rattle, their noise
mixed with a terrible howling. We reach the main thoroughfare of the camp. The
mob of fleeing Arabs grows larger. The other group attacks from the opposite
direction. The thunder of our hand-grenades echoes in the distance. We receive
an order to retreat. The attack has come to an end. [58]
Kibya and Commando Unit 101
Prime Minister Moshe
Sharett (1954-55) gave the following account of the massacre at the village of
Kibya in 1953 (October 18, 1953). Ariel Sharon personally commanded the action
in which men, women and children were slaughtered in their homes.
[In the cabinet meeting]
I condemned the Kibya Affair that exposed us in front of the whole world as a
gang of blood-suckers capable of massacres ... I warned that this stain will
stick to us and will not be washed away for years to come.
It was decided that a communique on
Kibya will be published and Ben Gurion was to write it. It is really a shameful
deed. I inquired several times and each time I was solemnly assured that people
would not find out how it had been done. [59
Sharett noted in his
Diary details of further massacres in Palestinian villages in 1955:
"Public opinion, the army and the police have concluded that Arab blood
can be freely shed. It must make the state appear in the eyes of the world as a
savage state." [60]
Kafr Qasim: The Slaughter
Continues
The massacre at Kafr
Qasim followed the Zionist pattern. In October 1956, Israeli Brigadier Shadmi,
the commander of a battalion on the Israeli-Jordanian border, ordered a night
curfew imposed on the "minority" [Arab] villages under his command.
These villages were inside the Israeli borders; thus, their inhabitants were
Israeli citizens. Shadmi told the commander of a Frontier Guard unit, Major
Melinki, that the curfew must be "extremely strict" and that "it
would not be enough to arrest those who broke it - they must be shot." He
added:
"A dead man is
better than the complications of detention." [61]
He [Melinki] informed the
assembled officers that ...their task was to impose the curfew in the minority
villages from 1700 to 0600 [5 p.m. to 6 a.m.]. ...Anyone leaving his home, or
anyone breaking the curfew should be shot dead. He added that there were to be
no arrests and that if a number of people were killed in the night this would
facilitate the imposition of the curfew during succeeding nights.
Lieutenant Frankanthal asked him:
“What do we do with the wounded?” Melinki replied: “Take no notice of them.”
A section leader, then asked: “What
about women and children?” to which Melinki replied: “No sentimentality.” When
asked: “What about people returning from their work?” Melinki answered: “It
will be just too bad for them, as the Commander said.”
The perpetrators of the
Kafr Qasim massacre - a commando unit of Ariel Sharon-Commando Unit 101 - were
all rewarded with medals and with promotions in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
The genocidal methods needed to
impose the colonial settler state within the pre-1967 borders of Israel are
regarded as the model for dealing ultimately with the Palestinians in the
post-1967 occupied territories. Aharon Yariv, former military intelligence
chief and Minister of Information, stated at a public seminar in the Leonard
Davis Institute for International Relations at the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem that:
There are opinions which
advocate that a war situation be utilized in order to exile 700,000 to 800,000
Arabs. These opinions are widespread. Statements have been voiced on the matter
and also instruments [apparatuses] have been prepared. [62]
NOTES
38. Hadawi, pp.43-44.
39. Joseph Weitz, A
Solution to the Refugee Problem, Davar, September 29,
1967. Cited in Uri Davis and Norton Mezvinsky, eds, Documents from
Israel, 1967-1973, p.21.
40. Davis, Israel:
An Apartheid State, p.5
41. Al Hamishmar
(Israeli newspaper), September 7, 1976.
42. Cited by Fouzi
El-Asmar and Salih Baransi during discussions with the author, October 1983.
43. Sabri Jiryis, The
Arabs in Israel (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976).
44. Gad Becker, Yediot
Ahronot, April 13, 1983, and The New York Times,
April 14, 1983.
45. Ibid.
46. David Ben Gurion, Memoirs,
Volume III, p.467.
47. Ben Gurion, from a
1937 speech cited in his Memoirs.
48. David Ben Gurion, Report
to the World Council of Poale Zion (the forerunner of the Labor
Party), Tel Aviv, 1938. Cited by Israel Shahak, Journal of Palestine
Studies, Spring 1981.
49. Ben Gurion in a 1938
speech.
50. Michael Bar Zohar, Ben
Gurion: A Biography (New York: Delacorte, 1978).
51. Ben Gurion, July
1948, as cited by Bar Zohar.
52. Brenner, The
Iron Wall, p.52.
53. Ibid., p.143.
54. Meir Pa’il, Yediot
Aharanot, April 4, 1972. Cited by David Hirst, The Gun and the
Olive Branch (Great Britain: Faber & Faber Ltd., 1977),
pp.126-127.
55. Jacques de Reynier, A
Jerusalem un Drapeau Flottait sur la Ligne de Feu, pp. 71-76. Cited by
Hirst, pp.127-8.
56. Davar,
June 9, 1979.
57. Eldad, On the
Spirit That Was Revealed in the People, De’ot, Winter
1968. Davis and Mezvinsky, pp.186-7.
58. Meir Har Tzion, Diary
(Tel Aviv: Levin-Epstein Ltd., 1969). Cited in Livia Rokach, Israel’s
Sacred Terrorism (Belmont, Mass.: Association of Arab American University
Graduates Inc. Press, 1980) p.68.
59. Rokach, p.16.
60. Ibid.
61. From the court
records: Judgments of the District Court: The Military Prosecutor vs.
Malor Melinki et. al., Rokach, p.66.
62. Ha’aretz,
May 23, 1980.
Chapter 5
|
|
It is appropriate to
review the pervasiveness of this murderous policy and its consequences. In the
territory which came under Israeli occupation after Partition there were
approximately 950,000 Palestinian Arabs. They inhabited nearly 500 villages and
all the major cities, which included Tiberias, Safed, Nazareth, Shafa Amr,
Acre, Haifa, Jaffa, Lydda, Ramle, Jerusalem, Majdal (Ashqelon), Isdud (Ashdod)
and Beersheba.
After less than six months only
138,000 people remained. (Figures vary from 130,000 to 165,000.)The great
majority of Palestinians were killed, forcibly expelled or fled in panic before
slaughtering bands of Israeli army units.
Having thus eliminated most of the
Palestinian inhabitants from the land of Palestine, the Israeli government undertook
the systematic destruction of their homes and possessions. Nearly 400 villages
and towns were razed to the ground during 1948 and 1949. More followed in the
1950s.
Moshe Dayan, former Chief of Staff
and Minister of Defense, was uninhibited in his summary of the nature of
Zionist colonization before students at the Israel Institute of Technology (The
Techniyon):
We came here to a country
that was populated by Arabs, and we are building here a Hebrew, Jewish state.
Instead of Arab villages, Jewish villages were established. You do not even
know the names of these villages and I do not blame you, because these
geography books no longer exist. Not only the books, but also the villages do
not exist.
Nahalal was established in place of
Mahalul, Gevat in place of Jibta, Sarid in the place of Hanifas and Kafr
Yehoushu’a in the place of Tel Shamam. There is not a single settlement that
was not established in the place of a former Arab village. [64]
The following table was
prepared by Israel Shahak, Chairperson of the Israeli League for Human and
Civil Rights, under the heading " Arab Villages Destroyed in Israel."
[65]
|
Destruction of
Palestinian Arab Villages |
|||
|
Name of the District |
Number of Villages |
||
|
Before ’48 |
1988 |
Destroyed |
|
|
Jerusalem |
33 |
4 |
29 |
|
Bethlehem |
7 |
0 |
7 |
|
Hebron |
16 |
0 |
16 |
|
Jaffa |
23 |
0 |
23 |
|
Ramle |
31 |
0 |
31 |
|
Lydda |
28 |
0 |
28 |
|
Jenin |
8 |
4 |
4 |
|
Tulkarm |
33 |
12 |
21 |
|
Haifa |
43 |
8 |
35 |
|
Acre |
52 |
32 |
20 |
|
Nazareth |
26 |
20 |
6 |
|
Safad |
75 |
7 |
68 |
|
Tiberias |
26 |
3 |
23 |
|
Bisan |
28 |
0 |
28 |
|
Gaza |
46 |
0 |
46 |
|
Total |
475 |
90 |
385 |
Shahak stresses that this
documented list is incomplete because it is impossible to find numerous Arab
communities and "tribes". Israeli official data characterize, for
example, 44 Bedouin villages and towns as "tribes", to reduce, by
census contrivance, the number of permanent Palestinian communities.
"Absentee" Property
With the expulsion of the
Palestinians and the destruction of their towns and villages, vast amounts of
property were seized under the rubric of the "Absentee Property Law"
(1950).
Until 1947, Jewish land ownership
in Palestine was some 6%. By the time the state was formally established, it
had sequestered 90% of the land:
Of the entire area of the
state of Israel only about 300,000 to 400,000 dunums [67,000-89,000 acres]
...are state domain which the Israeli government took over from the Mandatory
regime [British Mandate] [2%]. The J.N.F. (Jewish National Fund) and private
Jewish owners possess under two million dunums [ 10% ]. Almost all the rest
[i.e., 88% of the 20,225,000 dunums (4,500,000 acres) within the 1949 armistice
lines] belongs in law to Arab owners, many of whom have left the country. [66]
The value of this stolen
property was over $300 million - over thirty years ago. (Arab League estimates
are ten times this amount.) In current dollars, this figure would have to be
quadrupled.
The U.N. Refugee Office
estimated the value of Arab abandoned orchards, trees, movable and immovable
property in the territory under Israeli jurisdiction was about 118-120 million
Pounds Sterling, an average of £130 [$364] per refugee. [67]
The seizure of
Palestinian property was indispensable to make Israel a viable state. Between
1948 and 1953, 370 Jewish towns and settlements were established. Three hundred
fifty were on "absentee" property. By 1954, some 35% of Israel’s Jews
lived on property confiscated from absentees and some 250,000 new immigrants
settled in urban areas from which Palestinians had been expelled. Entire cities
had been emptied of Palestinians, such as Jaffa, Acre, Lydda, Ramle, Bisan and
Majdal (Ashqelon).
This plunder embraced 385 towns and
villages in their entirety and large sections of 94 other cities and towns,
containing 25% of all buildings in Israel. Ten thousand businesses and retail
stores were handed over to Jewish settlers.
From 1948 to 1953 - the period of
greatest immigration - the economic importance to Israel of seized Arab
property was decisive. The amount of cultivatable land seized from Palestinians
driven from their country by massacre was two and one half times the total area
of land granted the Zionists with the end of the mandate.
Virtually all citrus groves of
Palestinians were seized - consisting of more than 240,000 dunums [53,000
acres]. By 1951, 1.25 million boxes of citrus from seized Arab groves were in
Israeli hands - 10% of the country’s hard currency profits from export.
By 1951, 95% of all Israel’s olive
groves came from seized Palestinian land. Olive produce from stolen Palestinian
groves represented Israel’s third largest export - after citrus and diamonds.
One third of all stone production
came from 52 seized Palestinian quarries. [68]
Zionist mythology includes the
claim that Zionist industry, dedication and skill transformed an otherwise
barren desert land, neglected by its primitive nomadic Arab custodians, into a
garden - making the desert bloom. Palestinian orchards, industry, rolling
stock, factories, houses and possessions were pillaged after slaughtering
conquest - the Ship of State a vessel of pirates, its proper flag a skull and
crossbones.
"Judaizing" the Land
The Jewish National Fund
secured its first land in 1905. Its objectives were defined as the acquisition
of land "for the purpose of settling Jews on such lands."[69] In May
1954, the Keren Kayemeth le-Israel, "Perpetual Fund for Israel," was
incorporated in Israel and acquired all the assets of the Jewish National Fund.
In November 1961, the J.N.F. and
the Israeli government signed a covenant based on legislation adopted in July
1960. It established the Israel Lands Administration. A uniform policy was
legally in force on the 93% of the land in Israel under the aegis of the state,
which was bound by the policies of the Keren Kayemeth le-Israel and the
J.N.F.[69a]
As Prime Minister Levi Eshkol
declared to the Knesset (Israelj Parliament) upon proposing that the state of
Israel adopt the J.N.F.’s exclusive land policies: "The principle
established as the basis of the Jewjsh National Fund ... will be established as
a principle applying to state lands." [69b]
The Jewish National Fund is
explicit on this point. It declared in J.N.F. Report 6:
Following an agreement
between the government of Israel and the J.N.F., the Knesset in 1960 enacted
the Basic Law: Israel-Lands whjch gives legal effect to the ancient tradition
of ownership of the land in perpetuity by the Jewish people - the principle on
which the J.N.F. was founded. The same law extends that principle to the bulk
of Israel’s state domains. [69c]
Any relationship to this
land was governed by the following condition spelled out in all leases
pertaining to property:
The lessee must be Jewish
and must agree to execute all works connected with the cultivation of the
holding only with Jewish labor. [70]
The consequence is that
land cannot be leased to a non-Jew, nor can the lease be subleased, sold,
mortgaged, given or bequeathed to a non-Jew. Non-Jews cannot be employed on the
land nor in any work connected with cultivation. If these conditions are
violated both fines and the abrogation of the lease, without any compensation,
ensue.
What is particularly instructive is
that these regulations are enforced not just by the J.N.F., but by the state
under its laws. They apply to J.N.F. and all state lands, which consist,
overwhelmingly, of "absentee" property.
Non-Jews Need Not Apply
In Israel these state
lands are categorized as "national land". It means Jewish, not
"Israeli" land. Employment of non-Jews is treated as illegal and an
infraction of law. Because of a shortage of Jewish farm workers, and since
Palestinians are paid a fraction of the wages allowed Jewish workers, some
Jewish farmers (like former Defense Minister Ariel Sharon) employ Arabs. This
practice is illegal! In 1974, the Minister of Agriculture denounced the
practice as "a cancer". [71]
Settlements which sublease some
land in sharecropping arrangements with Arabs are denounced. The spread of the
practice, given the super-profits derived from cheap Palestinian labor, has
been labelled "a plague" by the Ministry of Agriculture. The
Settlement Department of the Jewish Agency has warned that such practices
violate the law, the regulations of the Jewish Agency and of the Covenant
between the Israeli State and the J.N.F. The employment of non-Jews has been
punished by fines and "a donation to a Special Fund". [72]
Israel Shahak has described this
process as "a disgusting mixture of racial discrimination and financial
corruption."
What all this reveals, however, is
that the state of Israel employs all normal usage in a racist sense. The
"people" means only Jews. An "immigrant" or a
"settler" can only be a Jew. A settlement means a settlement for Jews
alone. National land means Jewish land - not Israeli land.
Thus, law and rights, protections
and the entitlement to employment or property pertain to Jews only.
"Israeli" citizenship or nationality applies strictly to Jews in all
the specific applications of their meaning and governance.
Since the definition of a Jew is
entirely based upon orthodox religious dictate, "generations of maternal
Jewish descent" is the prerequisite to enjoy the right to property,
employment or protection under the law. There is no more pristine example of
racist laws and procedures.
Using these same criteria, over 55%
of the land and 70% of the water in the West Bank [territory occupied in 1967]
have been seized for the benefit of 6% of the population - some 40,000 settlers
among 800,000 Palestinians. In Gaza [territory occupied in 1967], 2,200
settlers have been given over 40% of the land. A half million Palestinians are
confined in crowded camps and slums.
Thus, the practices universally
decried in the post -1967 occupied territories are but the continuation of the
very process wherein the Israeli state itself was established. The use of
force, seizure of the land and exclusion of non-Jewish workers is central to
Zionist theory and practice. Theodor Herzl promulgated this program on June 12,
1895:
We shall ... spirit the
penniless population across the border ... while denying it any employment in
our country. [73]
The Racist Kibbutzim
Ironically, the Israeli
institution about which the greatest illusions are entertained is the Kibbutz -
a presumptive example of socialist cooperation.
As Israel Shahak stated:
The Israeli organization
which practices the greatest degree of racist exclusion is ... the Kibbutz. The
majority of Israelis have been aware of the racist character of the Kibbutz as
displayed not only against Palestinians but against all human beings who are
not Jews, for quite a time. [74]
The Kibbutzim exist
predominantly on seized Palestinian land. Non-Jews may not be members. Should
"temporary workers" who are Christians become involved with Jewish
women, they are forced to convert to Judaism in order to be members of a
Kibbutz. Shahak reports:
Christian candidates for
Kibbutz membership through conversion have to promise to spit in the future
when passing before a church or a cross. [75]
Today, some 93% of the
land in what is called the state of Israel is controlled by the Israel Lands
Administration under the guidelines of the Jewish National Fund. In order to be
entitled to live on land, to lease land, or to work on land one must prove at
least four generations of maternal Jewish descent.
If, in the United States, in order
to live on land, lease it, rent it, or work it in any way, you had to prove
that you did not have at least four generations of maternal Jewish descent, who
would doubt the racist nature of such legislation?
NOTES
63. A detailed analysis
of this process can be found in Janet Abu Lughod’s The Demographic
Transformation of Palestine, in Ibrahim Abu Lughod, ed., The Transformation
of Palestine (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971),
pp.139-64.
64. Moshe Dayan, March
19,1969, Ha’aretz, April 4, 1969, and cited in Davis.
65. Davis and Mezvinski,
p.47.
66. Jewish National
Fund, Jewish Villages in Israel, p.xxi. Quoted in Lehn and
Davis, The Jewish National Fund.
67. The U.N. estimate
was made in the late 1950s. Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Economy,
p.100. Cited in Davis, p.19. In their books, Davis and Kimmerling speak of
"118-120 billion Pounds Sterling." This author was unable to locate
the original United Nations report, but after thorough examination of other
sources, it appears Kimmerling (then Davis) made a typographical mistake. The
figure should be millions of Pounds Sterling - not billions.
68. Dan Peretz, Israel
and the Palestinian Arabs, pp.142., Davis, pp.20-21. South African
diamonds are cut and refined in Israel, in a revealing partnership, before they
are distributed to the world market.
69. Walter Lehn, The
Jewish National fund As An Instrument of Discrimination. Cited in Zionism
and Racism, (London: International Organization for the Elimination of
All Forms of Racial Discrimination, 1977), p.80.
69a. The Israel
Lands Administration Report (Jerusalem 1962) stipulates that the
I.L.A. has jurisdiction over "92.6%" of the total area of the state.
Hebrew University professor Uzzi Ornan identifies the area "to which the
principles of the J.N.F. apply" as "95% of pre-1967 Israel". Ma’ariv,
January 30, 1974.
69b. Walter Lehn with
Uri Davis, The Jewish National Fund, (London: Kegan Paul
International Ltd., 1988), p.114.
69c. Ibid.,
p.115.
70. J.N.F. lease,
article 23, cited in Israel Shahak, ed., The Non-Jew in the Jewish
State (Jerusalem: 1975).
71. Ha’aretz,
December 13, 1974.
72. Ma’ariv,
July 3, 1975.
73. Raphael Patai, ed., The
Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, (New York: 1960), p.88.
74. Israel Shahak, A
Message to the Human Rights Movement in America - Israel Today: The Other
Apartheid, Against the Current, January-February 1986.
75. Ibid.
Chapter 6
Zionism and the Jews
|
|
If the colonization of
Palestine has been characterized by a series of depredations, we should take a
moment to examine the attitude of the Zionist movement not only toward its
Palestinian victims (to which we shall return), but toward the Jews themselves.
Herzl himself wrote of the Jews in
the following fashion: “I achieved a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism, which
I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognized
the emptiness and futility of trying to ’combat’ anti-Semitism." [76] The
youth organization of the Zionists, Hashomer Hatzair (young Guard) published
the following: "A Jew is a caricature of a normal, natural human being,
both physically and spiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and
throws off the harness of social obligations, knows no order nor
discipline." [77] "The Jewish people," wrote Jabotinsky in the
same vein, "is a very bad people; its neighbors hate it and rightly so ...
its only salvation lies in a general immigration to the land of Israel."
[78] The founders of Zionism despaired of combatting anti-Semitism and,
paradoxically, regarded the anti-Semites themselves as allies, because of a
shared desire to remove the Jews from the countries in which they lived. Step
by step, they assimilated the values of Jew-hatred and anti-Semitism, as the
Zionist movement came to regard the anti-Semites themselves as their most
reliable sponsors and protectors.
Theodor Herzl approached none other
than Count Von Plehve, the author of the worst pogroms in Russia - the pogroms
of Kishinev with the following proposition: "Help me to reach the land
[Palestine] sooner and the revolt [against Czarist rule] will end." [79]
Von Plehve agreed, and he undertook to finance the Zionist movement. He was
later to complain to Herzl: “The Jews have been joining the revolutionary
parties. We were sympathetic to your Zionist movement as long as it worked
toward emigration. You don’t have to justify the movement to me. You are
preaching to a convert." [80] Herzl and Weizmann offered to help guarantee
Czarist interests in Palestine and to rid Eastern Europe and Russia of those
"noxious and subversive Anarcho-Bolshevik Jews".
As we have noted, the same appeal
was made by the Zionists to the Sultan of Turkey, the Kaiser in Germany, to
French imperialism and to the British Raj.
Zionism and Fascism
The history of Zionism -
largely suppressed - is sordid.
Mussolini set up squadrons of the
Revisionist Zionist youth movement, Betar, in black shirts in emulation of his
own Fascist bands.
When Menachem Begin became chief of
Betar, he preferred the brown shirts of the Hitler gangs, a uniform Begin and
Betar members wore to all meetings and rallies - at which they greeted each
other and opened and closed meetings with the fascist salute.
Simon Petilura was a Ukrainian
fascist who personally directed pogroms which killed 28,000 Jews in 897
separate pogroms. Jabotinsky negotiated an alliance with Petilura, proposing a
Jewish police force to accompany Petilura’s forces in their
counter-revolutionary fight against the Red Army and the Bolshevik Revolution -
a process involving the murder of peasant, worker and intellectual supporters
of the revolution.
Collaborating with the Nazis
This strategy of
enlisting Europe’s virulent Jew-haters, and of aligning with the most vicious
movements and regimes as financial and military patrons of a Zionist colony in
Palestine, did not exclude the Nazis.
The Zionist Federation of Germany
sent a memorandum of support to the Nazi Party on June 21, 1933. In it the
Federation noted:
... a rebirth of national
life such as is occurring in German life ... must also take place in the Jewish
national group.
On the foundation of the new [Nazi]
state which has established the principle of race, we wish so to fit our
community into the total structure so that for us, too, in the sphere assigned
to us, fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible ... [81]
Far from repudiating this
policy, the World Zionist Organization Congress in 1933 defeated a resolution
calling for action against Hitler by a vote of 240 to 43.
During this very Congress, Hitler
announced a trade agreement with the WZO’s Anglo-Palestine Bank, breaking,
thereby, the Jewish boycott of the Nazi regime at a time when the German
economy was extremely vulnerable. It was the height of the Depression and
people were wheeling barrels full of worthless German Marks. The World Zionist
Organization broke the Jewish boycott and became the principal distributor of
Nazi goods throughout the Middle East and Northern Europe. They established the
Ha’avara, which was a bank in Palestine designed to receive monies from the
German-Jewish bourgeoisie, with which sums Nazi goods were purchased in very
substantial quantity.
Embracing the S.S.
Consequently, the
Zionists brought Baron Von Mildenstein of the S.S. Security Service to
Palestine for a six-month visit in support of Zionism. This visit led to a
twelve-part report by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, in Der
Angriff (The Assault) in 1934 praising Zionism. Goebbels ordered a medallion
struck with the Swastika on one side, and on the other, the Zionist Star of
David. In May 1935, Reinhardt Heydrich, the chief of the S.S. Security Service,
wrote an article in which he separated Jews into "two categories."
The Jews he favored were the Zionists: "Our good wishes together with our
official good will go with them."[82] In 1937, the Labor
"socialist" Zionist militia, the Haganah (founded by Jabotinsky) sent
an agent (Feivel Polkes) to Berlin offering to spy for the S.S. Security
Service in exchange for the release of Jewish wealth for Zionist colonization.
Adolf Eichmann was invited to Palestine as the guest of the Haganah.
Feivel Polkes informed Eichmann:
Jewish nationalist
circles were very pleased with the radical German policy, since the strength of
the Jewish population in Palestine would be so far increased thereby that in
the foreseeable future the Jews could reckon upon numerical superiority over
the Arabs. [83]
The list of acts of
Zionist collaboration with the Nazis goes on and on. What can account for this
incredible willingness of Zionist leaders to betray the Jews of Europe? The
entire rationale for the state of Israel offered by its apologists has been
that it was intended to be the refuge of Jews facing persecution.
The Zionists, to the contrary, saw
any effort to rescue Europe’s Jews not as the fulfilment of their political
purpose but as a threat to their entire movement. If Europe’s Jews were saved,
they would wish to go elsewhere and the rescue operation would have nothing to
do with the Zionist project of conquering Palestine.
Sacrificing Europe’s Jews
The correlative to the
acts of collaboration with the Nazis throughout the 1930’s was that when
attempts to change the immigration laws of the United States and Western Europe
were contemplated in order to provide token refuge for persecuted Jews of
Europe, it was the Zionists who actively organized to stop these efforts.
Ben Gurion informed a meeting of
Labor Zionists in Great Britain in 1938: "If I knew that it would be
possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England
and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the
second alternative." [84] This obsession with colonizing Palestine and
overwhelming the Arabs led the Zionist movement to oppose any rescue of the
Jews facing extermination, because the ability to deflect select manpower to
Palestine would be impeded. From 1933 to 1935, the WZO turned down two-thirds
of all the German Jews who applied for immigration certificates.
Berel Katznelson, editor of the
Labor Zionist Davar, described the "cruel criteria of Zionism":
German Jews were too old to bear children in Palestine, lacked trades for
building a Zionist colony, didn’t speak Hebrew and weren’t Zionists. In place
of these Jews facing extermination the WZO brought to Palestine 6,000 trained
young Zionists from the United States, Britain and other safe countries. Worse
than this, the WZO not merely failed to seek any alternative for the Jews
facing the Holocaust, the Zionist leadership opposed belligerently all efforts
to find refuge for fleeing Jews.
As late as 1943, while the Jews of
Europe were being exterminated in their millions, the U.S. Congress proposed to
set up a commission to "study" the problem. Rabbi Stephen Wise, who
was the principal American spokesperson for Zionism, came to Washington to
testify against the rescue bill because it would divert attention from the
colonization of Palestine.
This is the same Rabbi Wise who, in
1938, in his capacity as leader of the American Jewish Congress, wrote a letter
in which he opposed any change in U.S. immigration laws which would enable Jews
to find refuge. He stated:
It may interest you to
know that some weeks ago the representatives of all the leading Jewish
organizations met in conference ... It was decided that no Jewish organization
would, at this time, sponsor a bill which would in any way alter the
immigration laws. [85]
Fighting Asylum
The entire Zionist
establishment made its position unmistakable in its response to a motion by 227
British members of Parliament calling on the government to provide asylum in
British territories for persecuted Jews. The meager undertaking which was
prepared was as follows:
His Majesty’s Government
issued some hundreds of Mauritius and other immigration permits in favor of
threatened Jewish families.[86]
But even this token
measure was opposed by the Zionist leaders. At a Parliamentary meeting on
January 27, 1943, when the next steps were being pursued by over one hundred
members of Parliament, a spokesperson for the Zionists announced that they
opposed this motion because it did not contain preparations for the
colonization of Palestine. This was a consistent stance.
Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader
who had arranged the Balfour Declaration and was to become the first president
of Israel, made this Zionist policy very explicit:
The hopes of Europe’s six
million Jews are centered on emigration. I was asked: “Can you bring six
million Jews to Palestine?” I replied, “No.” ... From the depths of the tragedy
I want to save ... young people [for Palestine]. The old ones will pass. They
will bear their fate or they will not. They are dust, economic and moral dust
in a cruel world ... Only the branch of the young shall survive. They have to
accept it. [87]
Yitzhak Gruenbaum, the
chairperson of the committee set up by the Zionists, nominally to investigate
the condition of European Jews, said:
When they come to us with
two plans - the rescue of the masses of Jews in Europe or the redemption of the
land - I vote, without a second thought, for the redemption of the land. The
more said about the slaughter of our people, the greater the minimization of
our efforts to strengthen and promote the Hebraisation of the land. If there
would be a possibility today of buying packages of food with the money of the
Karen Hayesod [United Jewish Appeal] to send it through Lisbon, would we do
such a thing? No. And once again no! [88]
Betraying the Resistance
In July 1944, the
Slovakian Jewish leader Rabbi Dov Michael Weissmandel in a letter to Zionist
officials charged with these "rescue organizations," proposed a
series of measures to save the Jews scheduled for liquidation at Auschwitz. He
offered exact mappings of the railways and urged the bombing of the tracks on
which the Hungarian Jews were being transported to the crematoria.
He appealed for the bombing of the
furnaces at Auschwitz, for the parachuting of ammunition to 80,000 prisoners,
for the parachuting of saboteurs to blow up all the means of annihilation and
thus end the cremation of 13,000 Jews every day.
Should the Allies refuse the
organized and public demand by the "rescue organizations",
Weissmandel proposed that the Zionists, who had funds and organization, obtain
airplanes, recruit Jewish volunteers and carry out the sabotage.
Weissmandel was not alone.
Throughout the late thirties and forties, Jewish spokespersons in Europe cried
out for help, for public campaigns, for organized resistance, for
demonstrations to force the hand of allied Govemments - only to be met not
merely by Zionist silence but by active Zionist sabotage of the meager efforts
which were proposed or prepared in Great Britain and the United States.
Here is the cri-de-coeur
of Rabbi Weissmandel. Writing to the Zionists in July 1944 he asked
incredulously.
Why have you done nothing
until now? Who is guilty of this frightful negligence? Are you not guilty, our
Jewish brothers: you who have the greatest good fortune in the world - liberty?
We send you – Rabbi
Weissmandel wrote again – this special message: to inform you that yesterday
the Germans began the deportation of Jews from Hungary ... The deported ones go
to Auschwitz to be put to death by cyanide gas. This is the schedule, of
Auschwitz from yesterday to the end:
Twelve thousand Jews -
men, women and children, old men, infants, healthy and sick ones, are to be
suffocated daily.
And you, our brothers in
Palestine, in all the countries of freedom, and you ministers of all the
Kingdoms, how do you keep silent in the face of this great murder?
Silent while thousands upon
thousands, reaching now to six million Jews, are murdered? And silent now,
while tens of thousands are still being murdered and waiting to be murdered?
Their destroyed hearts cry out to you for help as they bewail your cruelty.
Brutal, you are and murderers, too,
you are, because of the coldbloodedness of the silence in which you watch,
because you sit with folded arms and do nothing, although you could stop or
delay the murder of Jews at this very hour.
You, our brothers, sons of Israel,
are you insane? Don’t you know the hell around us? For whom are you saving your
money? Murderers! Madmen! Who is it that gives charity: you who toss a few
pennies from your safe homes, or we who give our blood in the depths of hell?
[90]
No Zionist leader
supported his request, nor did the Western capitalist regimes bomb a single
concentration camp.
A Pact Against Hungary’s Jews
The culmination of
Zionist betrayal was the sacrifice of Hungary’s Jews in a series of agreements
between the Zionist movement and Nazi Germany which first became known in 1953.
Dr. Rudolph Kastner of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee in Budapest signed a
secret pact with Adolf Eichmann to "settle the Jewish question" in
Hungary. This took place in 1944. The pact sealed the fate of 800,000 Jews.
It was to be revealed later that
Kastner was under the direction of the Zionist leaders abroad when he made his
agreement with Eichmann. The agreement entailed the saving of six hundred
prominent Jews on the condition that silence was maintained about the fate of
Hungarian Jewry.
When a survivor, Malchiel
Greenwald, exposed the pact and denounced Kastner as a Nazi collaborator whose
"deeds in Budapest cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews",
[91] Greenwald was sued by the Israeli government, whose leaders had drawn up
the terms of the Kastner pact.
The Israeli Court came to the
following conclusion:
The sacrifice of the
majority of the Jews, in order to rescue the prominents was the basic element
in the agreement between Kastner and the Nazis. This agreement fixed the
division of the nation into two unequal camps, a small fragment of prominents,
whom the Nazis promised Kastner to save, on the one hand, and the great
majority of Hungarian Jews whom the Nazis designated for death, on the other
hand. [92]
The court declared that
the imperative condition of this pact was that neither Kastner nor the Zionist
leaders would interfere in the action of the Nazis against the Jews. These
leaders undertook not only to eschew interference, but they agreed they would
not, in the words of the Israeli court, "hamper them in the
extermination."
Collaboration between the
Jewish Agency Rescue Committee and the exterminators of the Jews was solidified
in Budapest and Vienna. Kastner’s duties were part and parcel of the S.S. In
addition to its Extermination Department and Looting Department, the Nazi S.S.
opened a Rescue Department headed by Kastner. [93]
Saving Nazis, Not Jews
It is not surprising that
it was to be revealed that Kastner intervened to save S.S. General Kurt Becher
from being tried for war crimes. Becher was one of the leading negotiators of
the deal with the Zionists in 1944. He was also an S.S. Major in Poland, a
member of the Death Corps "that worked around the clock killing
Jews." "Becher distinguished himself as a Jew slaughterer in Poland
and Russia." [94] He was appointed Commissar of all Nazi concentration
camps by Heinrich Himmler.
What happened to him? He became
president of many corporations and headed up the sale of wheat to Israel. His
corporation, the Cologne-Handel Gesellschaft, did extensive business with the
Israeli government.
A Military Pact with Nazism
On January 11, 1941,
Avraham Stern proposed a formal military pact between the National Military
Organization (NMO), of which Yitzhak Shamir, the current Prime Minister of
Israel, was a prominent leader, and the Nazi Third Reich. This proposal became
known as the Ankara document, having been discovered after the war in the files
of the German Embassy in Turkey. It states the following:
The evacuation of the
Jewish masses from Europe is a precondition for solving the Jewish question;
but this can only be made possible and complete through the settlement of these
masses in the home of the Jewish people, Palestine, and through the
establishment of a Jewish state in its historical boundaries ...
The NMO, which is well-acquainted
with the goodwill of the German Reich government and its authorities towards
Zionist activity inside Germany and towards Zionist emigration plans, is of the
opinion that:
1.
Common interests could exist between the establishment of a New Order in
Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations
of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO.
2.
Cooperation between the new Germany and renewed folkish-national
Hebraium would be possible and
3.
The establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and
totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the German Reich, would be in
the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power
in the Near East.
Proceeding from these
considerations, the NMO in Palestine, under the condition that the
above-mentioned national aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are
recognized on the side of the German Reich, offers to actively take part in the
war on Germany’s side. [95]
Zionism’s Perfidy
Zionism’s perfidy - the
betrayal of the victims of the Holocaust - was the culmination of their attempt
to identify the interests of the Jews with those of the established order.
Today, the Zionists join their state to the enforcement arm of U.S. imperialism
- from the death squads of Latin America to the covert operations of the C.I.A.
on four continents.
This sordid history is rooted in
the demoralization of the founders of Zionism, who rejected the possibility of
overcoming anti-Semitism through popular struggle and social revolution. Moses
Hess, Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann chose the wrong side of the barricades -
that of state power, class domination and exploitative rule. They propounded a
putative disjunction between emancipation from persecution and the necessity of
social change. They fully understood that the cultivation of anti-Semitism and
the persecution of the Jews were the work of the very ruling class from whom
they curried favor.
In seeking the sponsorship of the
anti-Semites themselves, they revealed several motives: the worship of power
with which they associated strength; a desire to end Jewish
"weakness" and vulnerability, ceasing to be perpetual outsiders.
This sensibility was a short step
to assimilating the values and ideas of the Jew-haters themselves. The Jews,
the Zionists wrote, were indeed an undisciplined, subversive, dissident people,
worthy of the scorn they had earned. The Zionists catered shamelessly to racist
Jew-hatred. Worshipping power, they appealed to the anti-Semitic desire of the
von Plehves and the Himmlers to be rid of a victim people long radicalized by
persecution, a people who filled the ranks of revolutionary movements and whose
suffering drew their best minds to intellectual ferment offensive to
established values.
The dirty secret of Zionist history
is that Zionism was threatened by the Jews themselves. Defending the Jewish
people from persecution meant organizing resistance to the regimes which
menaced them. But these regimes embodied the imperial order which comprised the
only social force willing or able to impose a settler colony on the Palestinian
people. Hence, the Zionists needed the persecution of the Jews to persuade Jews
to become colonizers afar, and they needed the persecutors to sponsor the
enterprise.
But European Jewry had never
manifested any interest in colonizing Palestine. Zionism remained a fringe
movement among the Jews, who aspired to live in the countries of their birth
free of discrimination or to escape persecution by emigrating to bourgeois
democracies perceived as more tolerant.
Zionism, therefore, could never answer
the needs or aspirations of the Jews. The moment of truth came when persecution
gave way to physical extermination. Put to the ultimate and sole test of their
real relationship to Jewish survival, the Zionists did not merely fail to lead
resistance or defend the Jews, they actively sabotaged Jewish efforts to
boycott the Nazi economy. They sought, even then, the sponsorship of the mass
murderers themselves, not merely because the Third Reich appeared powerful
enough to impose a Zionist colony, but because the Nazi practices were
consonant with Zionist assumptions.
There was a common ground between
the Nazis and the Zionists, expressed not merely in the proposal of Shamir’s
National Military Organization to form a state in Palestine on a "national
totalitarian basis." Vladimir Jabotinsky, in his last work, The
Jewish War Front, (l940) wrote of his plans for the Palestinian
people:
Since we have this great
moral authority for calmly envisaging the exodus of Arabs, we need not regard
the possible departure of 900,000 with dismay. Herr Hitler has recently been
enhancing the popularity of population transfer. [96]
Jabotinsky’s remarkable
declaration in The Jewish War Front synthesizes Zionist
thought and its moral bankruptcy. The slaughter of the Jews gave Zionism
"great moral authority". - For what? "For calmly envisaging the
exodus of Arabs.” The lesson of Nazi destruction of the Jews was that it was
permissible now for Zionists to visit the same fate upon the entire Palestinian
population.
Seven years later, the Zionists
emulated the Nazis, whose backing they sought and even at times achieved, and
they covered bleeding Palestine in multiple Lidices [97], driving 800,000
people into exile.
The Zionists approached the Nazis
in the same spirit they had Von Plehve, acting on the perverse notion that
Jew-hatred was useful. Their purpose was not rescue, but forced conscription of
the select few - the rest to be consigned to their agonizing fate.
Zionism sought bodies with which to
colonize Palestine and preferred Jewish corpses in their millions to any rescue
that might settle Jews elsewhere.
If ever a people could be expected
to grasp the meaning of persecution, the pain of being perpetual refugees and
the humiliation of slander, it ought to have been the Jews.
In place of compassion, the
Zionists celebrated the persecution of others, even as they first betrayed the
Jews and then degraded them. They selected a victim people of their own on whom
to inflict a conquering design. They aligned the surviving Jews with a new
genocide against the Palestinian people, cloaking themselves, with savage
irony, in the collective shroud of the Holocaust.
NOTES
76. Marvin Lowenthal,
ed., The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, p.6. Cited in Lenni
Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (Westport, Conn.:
Lawrence Hill, 1983) p.6.
77. From Our Shomer
“Weltanschauung”, Hashomer Hatzair, December 1936.
Originally published in 1917, Brenner, Zionism, p.22.
78. Brenner, The
Iron Wall.
79. lbid., p.14.
80. Ibid.
81. Brenner, Zionism,
p.48.
82. Ibid., p.85.
83. Ibid., p.99.
84. Ibid.,
p.149.
85. Ibid.
86. Rabbi Solomon
Schonfeld, Britain’s chief Rabbi during World War II. Faris Yahya, Zionist
Relations with Nazi Germany (Beirut, Lebanon: Palestine Research
Center, January 1978), p.53.
87. Chaim Weizmann
reporting to the Zionist Congress in 1937 on his testimony before the Peel
Commission in London, July 1937. Cited in Yahya, p. 55.
88. Yitzhak Gruenbaum
was chairperson of the Jewish Agency’s Rescue Committee. Excerpted from a
speech made in 1943. Ibid., p.56.
89. Ibid.,
p.53.
90. Ibid.,
pp.59-60.
91. Ibid.,
p.58.
92. Judgment given on
June 22, 1955, Protocol of Criminal Case 124/53 in District Court,
Jerusalem. Ibid., p.58.
93. Ibid.,
p.59.
94. Ben Hecht, Perfidy
(New York: 1961), pp.58-59. Ibid., p.60.
95. Proposal of
the National Military Organization - Irgun Zvai Leumi
- Concerning the Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe and the
Participation of the N.M.O. in the War on the side of Germany.
Original text found in David Yisraeli, The Palestine Problem in German
Politics. 1889-1945. (Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar Ilan University, 1974),
pp.315-317, Brenner. Zionism, p.267.
96. Brenner, The
Iron Wall, p.107.
97. Lidice was a Czech
village razed to the ground by the S.S. It became a symbol of Nazi brutality
and was singled out as a war crime during the Nuremberg Trials.
|
Chapter
7
|
"Security" has
been the catch-phrase deployed to screen widespread massacre of civilian
populations throughout Palestine and Lebanon, for the confiscation of
Palestinian and Arab land, for the expansion into surrounding territory and the
establishment of new settlements, for deportation and for sustained torture of
political prisoners.
The publication of the Personal
Diary of Moshe Sharett (Yoman ishi, Maariv, Tel Aviv,
1979) demolished the myth of security as the motor force of Israeli policy.
Moshe Sharett was a former Prime Minister of Israel (1954-55), director of the
Jewish Agency’s Political Department and Foreign Minister (1948-56).
Sharett’s diary reveals in explicit
language that the Israeli political and military leadership never believed in
any Arab danger to Israel.
They sought to maneuver and force
the Arab states into military confrontations which the Zionist leadership were
certain of winning so Israel could carry out the destabilization of Arab
regimes and the planned occupation of additional territory.
Sharett described the governing
motive of Israeli military provocation:
To bring about the
liquidation of all ... Palestinian claims to Palestine through the dispersion
of the Palestinian refugees to distant corners of the world. [98]
The Sharett diaries
document a longstanding program of Israel’s leaders from both Labor and Likud:
to "dismember the Arab world, defeat the Arab national movement and create
puppet regimes under regional Israeli power." [99] Sharett cites cabinet
meetings, position papers and policy memoranda which prepared wars "to
modify the balance of power in the region radically, transforming Israel into
the major power in the Middle East." [100] Sharett reveals that far from
Israel "reacting" to Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal for
its war of October 1956, the Israeli leadership had prepared this war and had
it on their agenda from autumn 1953, one year before Nasser came to power.
Sharett recounts how the Israeli cabinet had agreed that international
conditions for this war would mature within three years. The explicit intent
was "the absorption of the Gaza territory and of the Sinai". A
timetable for conquest was decided at the highest military and political level.
The occupation of Gaza and the West Bank was prepared in the early 1950s. In
1954, David Ben Gurion and Moshe Dayan developed a detailed plan to instigate
internal Lebanese conflict in order to fragment Lebanon. This was sixteen years
before an organized Palestinian political presence occurred there in the
aftermath of the expulsions from Jordan in 1970, when King Hussein slaughtered
Palestinians in what came to be known as "Black September". Sharett
described "the use of terror and aggression to provoke" in order to
facilitate conquest:
I have been meditating on
the long chain of false incidents and hostilities we have invented and on the
many clashes we have provoked which cost so much blood, and on the violations
of law by our men all of which have brought grave disaster and determined the
whole course of events. [101]
>
Sharett recounts how on
October 11, 1953, Israeli President Ben Zvi "raised as usual some inspired
questions such as [our] chance to occupy the Sinai and how wonderful it would
be if the Egyptians started an offensive so we could follow with an invasion of
the desert." [102]
On October 26, 1953, Sharett
writes:
1) The Army considers the
present border with Jordan as absolutely unacceptable. 2) The Army is planning
war in order to occupy the rest of Eretz Israel. [103]
By January 31, 1954,
Dayan outlined war plans, disclosed by Sharett :
We should advance
militarily into Syria and realize a series of faits accomplis. The interesting
conclusion from all this regards the direction in which the Chief of Staff is
thinking. [104]
Absorbing Lebanon
In May 1954, Ben Gurion
and Dayan formulated a war plan for the absorption of Lebanon:
According to Dayan, the
only thing that’s necessary is to find an officer, even just a Major. We should
... buy him ... to make him agree to declare himself the savior of the Maronite
population.
Then the Israeli army will enter
Lebanon, will occupy the necessary territory and will create a Christian regime
which will ally itself with Israel. The territory from the Litani southward
will be totally annexed to Israel and everything will be all right.
If we were to accept the advice of
the Chief of Staff we would do it tomorrow, without awaiting a signal [sic]
from Baghdad. [105]
But twelve days later,
Dayan had moved into high gear for the planned invasion, occupation and
dismemberment of Lebanon:
The Chief of Staff
supports a plan to hire a Lebanese officer who will agree to serve as a puppet
so that the Israeli army may appear as responding to his appeal “to liberate
Lebanon from its Muslim oppressors”. [106]
he entire scenario,
therefore, for the 1982 war in Lebanon was in place twenty-eight years earlier,
before the P.L.O. existed.
Sharett, who opposed the original
action, recounts how the invasion of Lebanon was postponed.
Green Light from the C.I.A.
The C.I.A. gave Israel
the ’green light’ to attack Egypt. The energies of Israel’s security
establishment became wholly absorbed by the preparations for the war which
would take place exactly one year later. [107]
The real relationship of
Israel to the Arab national movement is placed by Sharett in the clear context
of service to U.S. global dominion, of which Zionist expansion is an essential
component:
... We have a free hand
and God bless us if we act audaciously ... Now ... the U.S. is interested in
toppling Nasser’s regime ... but it does not dare at the moment to use the
methods it adopted to topple the leftist government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala
[1954] and of Mossadegh in Iran [1953] ... It prefers its work to be done by
Israel.
... Isser [General] proposes
seriously and pressingly ... that we carry out our plan for the occupation of
the Gaza Strip now ... The situation is changed and there are other reasons
which determine that it is “time to act”. First the discovery of oil near the
Strip ... its defense requires dominating the Strip - this alone is worth
dealing with the troublesome question of the refugees. [108]
Moshe Sharett anticipated
another wave of slaughter, which did, in fact, occur. On February 17, 1955, he
wrote:
... We cry out over our
isolation and the dangers to our security, we initiate aggression and reveal
ourselves as being bloodthirsty and aspiring to perpetrate mass massacres.
[109]
Ben Gurion and Dayan
proposed that Israel create a pretext to seize the Gaza Strip. Sharett’s own
evaluation on March 27, 1955, was prophetic:
Let us assume that there
are 200,000 Arabs in the Gaza Strip. Let us assume that half of them will run
or will be made to run to the Hebron Hills. Obviously, they will run away
without anything and shortly after they establish themselves in some stable
environment, they will become again riotous and homeless. It is easy to imagine
the outrage and hate and bitterness.
... And we shall have 100,000 of
them in the Strip, and it is easy to imagine what means we shall resort to in
order to suppress them and what kind of headlines we shall receive in the
international press. The first round would be: Israel aggressively invades the
Gaza Strip. The second: Israel causes again the terrified flight of masses of
Arab refugees. Their hate will be rekindled by the atrocities that we shall
cause them to suffer during the occupation. [110]
One year later, Dayan’s
troops occupied the Gaza Strip, Sinai, the Straits of Tiran and were deployed
along the Suez Canal.
From Herzl to Dayan
The plans exposed by
Moshe Sharett did not originate with David Ben Gurion or Moshe Dayan. In 1904,
Theodor Herzl described the territory over which the Zionist movement laid
claim as inclusive of all the land "from the Brook of Egypt to the
Euphrates". [111] The territory embraced all of Lebanon and Jordan, two
thirds of Syria, one-half of Iraq, a strip of Turkey, one-half of Kuwait, one
third of Saudi Arabia, the Sinai and Egypt, including Port Said, Alexandria and
Cairo.
In his testimony before the United
Nations Special Committee of Enquiry which was preparing the Partition of
Palestine (July 9, 1947), Rabbi Fischmann, the official representative of the
Jewish agency for Palestine, reiterated Herzl’s claims:
The Promised Land extends
from the River of Egypt up to the Euphrates. It includes parts of Syria and
Lebanon. [l12]
Notes
98. Rokach, p.5.
99. Ibid.
100. Ibid.,
p.4.
101. Ibid.,
p.6.
102. Ibid.,
p.14.
103. Ibid.,
p.18.
104. Ibid.,
p.19.
105. Ibid.,
p.29
106. Ibid.
107. Ibid.,
p.30.
108. Ibid.,
p.55.
109. Ibid.,
p.45.
110. Ibid.,
p.50.
111. Herzl, Diaries.
Vol.II, 1904, p.711.
112. Israel Shahak, The
Zionist Plan for the Middle East (Belmont, Mass.: A.A.U.G., 1982).
|
Chapter
8
|
Zionist designs upon
Lebanon long antedated the formation of the state of Israel. In 1918, Britain
was informed of Zionist claims to Lebanon up to and inclusive of the Litani
River. British plans in 1920 to designate the Litani the northern border of a
Jewish state were altered in response to French objections.
By 1936, the Zionists had offered
to support Maronite hegemony in Lebanon. The Maronite Patriarch then testified
to the Peel Commission in favor of a Zionist state in Pa1estine. In 1937, Ben
Gurion spoke of Zionist plans for Lebanon to the Zionist World Workers Party,
which was meeting in Zurich:
They are the natural ally
of the land of Israel. The proximity of Lebanon will further our loyal allies
as soon as the Jewish state is created and give us the possibility to expand
... [113]
In 1948, Israel occupied
up to the Litani but withdrew a year later under pressure. Sharett reports of
Ben Gurion’s timetable in 1954 to induce the Maronites to fragment Lebanon:
This is now the Central
Task ... We must invest the time and energy to bring about a fundamental change
in Lebanon. Dollars should not be spared ... We will not be forgiven if we miss
the historic opportunity. [114]
The invasion of Lebanon
in 1982 followed a series of raids and invasions in 1968, 1976, 1978 and 1981.
Plans to dismember Lebanon were joined now to the primary objective of
dispersing the Palestinian inhabitants of Lebanon through massacre followed by
expulsion.
The invasion was planned jointly
with the U.S. government. The Maronite Phalange was part of the project:
"When Amin Gemayel visited Washington the previous Fall, he was asked by
an American official when the invasion was due." [115]
Later, when Defense Minister Ariel
Sharon visited Washington: "Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, gave the
green light for the invasion."[116]
The invasion of Lebanon was
launched under the rubric "Peace in the Galilee". Cruel irony! The
original inhabitants of the Galilee had lived there for a millennium and were
driven out by massacre in 1948. They had settled near Sidon, setting up tents
in a refugee camp they called Ain El Helweh, "Sweet Spring".
The camp was organized in areas
corresponding to the Galilean communities from which people had come. A
miniature Galilee, its areas replicated the villages of the homeland in the
Diaspora tent town which was Ain El Helweh.
In 1952, they were allowed to
convert tents into permanent structures and they numbered now, some 80,000, the
largest Palestinian camp in Lebanon.
On Sunday, June 6, 1982, at 5:30
a.m., intensive aerial bombardment began with the onset of the invasion. The
Israelis took Ain El Helweh as a grid, using a saturation-bombing pattern in a
series of quadrants. First one quadrant was subjected to carpet-bombing and
then the next-methodically and relentlessly, the bombing of each quadrant
renewed as the last was levelled. The bombing continued in this manner for ten
days and nights. Cluster bombs, concussion bombs, high flaring incendiary bombs
and white phosphorus were used.
It was followed by a further ten
days of bombardment from the sea and air. Then bulldozers were brought by the
Israelis to reduce to rubble what remained standing. Shelters were covered,
burying people alive, their frantic family members clutching at the bulldozers.
Norwegian health workers who survived, reported:
It smelled like dead
bodies everywhere. Everything was devastated. [117]
From 500,000 to 50,000
The invasion of Lebanon
in the summer of 1982 had as its purpose the scattering through massacre and
terror of the entire Palestinian population.
Prior to the invasion of Lebanon in
1982, Ariel Sharon and Bashir Gemayel had declared on separate occasions that
they would reduce the Palestinians in Lebanon from 500,000 to 50,000. As the
invasion unfolded, these plans began to surface in the pages of the Israeli and
Western press. Ha’aretz reported on September 26, 1982:
A long-term objective
aimed at the expulsion of the whole Palestinian population of Lebanon beginning
with Beirut. The purpose was to create a panic to convince [sic] all the
Palestinians of Lebanon that they were no longer safe in that country.
The London Sunday
Times reported on the same day:
This carefully preplanned
military operation to ’purge’ the camps was called Moah Barzel or Iron Brain;
the plan was familiar to Sharon and Begin and part of Sharon’s larger plan
discussed by the Israeli Cabinet on July 17.
Bashir Gemayel became
emboldened as the Israeli blitzkrieg swept through Lebanon. "The
Palestinians," he declared, "are a people too many. We will not rest
until every true Lebanese has killed at least one Palestinian." [118]
A prominent Lebanese army doctor
told his unit: "Soon there will not be a single Palestinian in Lebanon. They
are a bacteria which must be exterminated." [119]
The Sabra and Shatila Massacres
The massacres which
ensued bore a grim resemblance to the slaughter of the innocents engulfing Deir
Yassin, Dueima, Kibya and Kfar Qasim as Palestine was depopulated from 1947
through the 1950’s.
The Western and Israeli reports
made the murderous purpose of Israel’s invasion unmistakable: "By Sharon’s
admission, the Israelis planned two weeks ago to have the Lebanese Forces enter
the camps," wrote Time Magazine. Later in the same
article, it became clear that this had been prepared long before.
Top Israeli officers
planned many months ago to enlist the Lebanese Forces, made up of the combined
Christian militias headed by Bashir Gemayel, to enter the Palestinian refugee camps
once an Israeli encirclement of West Beirut had been completed.
On several occasions Gemayel told
Israeli officials he would raze the camps and flatten them into tennis courts.
This fits in with Israeli thinking. The Christian militia forces that were
known to have gone into the camps were trained by the Israelis. [120]
The Israeli press was
equally explicit in its reports of Israeli plans. On September 15, Ha’aretz
quoted Chief of Staff General Raphael Eitan: " All four Palestinian camps
are surrounded and hermetically sealed."
The New York Times had corroborated the Time Magazine
account:
Sharon told the Knesset
that the General Staff and the Commander in Chief of the Phalangists met twice
with Israel’s ranking generals on September 15 and discussed entering the camps
which they did the next afternoon. [121]
The Killer Militia
Two months before the
massacre of Sabra and Shatila, perhaps the most remarkable account appeared in
the Jerusalem Post. A long interview was published with Major
Etienne Saqr [code name, Abu Arz]. Major Saqr was the leader of the
several-thousand-strong rightwing militia, "The Guardians of the
Cedars".
The Jerusalem Post disclosed that
Major Saqr "is about to leave for the United States to put his credo and
solutions" before Americans. "Since 1975, he has propagated the
Israeli solution ... and Israel has supported him in every possible material
way." [122]
Major Saqr’s own remarks
foreshadowed what would later shock the world at the Palestinian camps of Sabra
and Shatila:
It is the Palestinians we
have to deal with. Ten years ago there were 84,000; now there are between
600,000 and 700,000. In six years there will be two million. We can’t let it
come to that.
When asked by the Jerusalem
Post: "What is your solution?" Major Saqr replied:
"Very simple. We shall drive them to the borders of ’brotherly’ Syria ...
Anyone who looks back, stops or returns will be shot on the spot. We have the
moral right, reinforced by well-organized public relations plans and political
preparations."
Are you – asked the Jerusalem
Post – able to implement this threat? (He does not blink an eyelid.)
“Of course we can. And we shall.”
Major Saqr had played a
major role in the 1976 massacre of Palestinians in Tal al Zaatar refugee camp.
After the massacres of Sabra and
Shatila, Major Saqr returned to Jerusalem to hold a press conference in which
he took responsibility for carrying out the massacre with the Israelis:
"No one has the right to criticize us; we carried out our duty, our sacred
responsibility." [123]
He left this press conference where
he claimed a share in the "credit" for mass murder to attend a
meeting with Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
Major Saqr surfaced again, now
based in the Israeli command headquarters in the Suraya complex in Sidon, near
Ain El Helweh. His militia distributed leaflets throughout Sidon which read:
Germs live only in rot.
Let us prevent rot from infiltrating society. Let us continue the work of
destruction of the last bastions of the Palestinians and smash whatever life is
left in this poisonous snake.
Major Saqr had worked
closely with the notorious intelligence chief for Bashir Gemayel’s militia,
Elie Hobeika. Hobeika was known as the C.I.A.’s man in Beirut.
Jonathan Randal of the Washington
Post cited Hobeika’s declarations in Beirut, ascribing these to
"one of the killers"; they echoed those of Major Saqr in Jerusalem:
Shoot them against the
pink and blue walls; slaughter them in the half-light of the evening. The only
way you will find out how many Palestinians we killed is if they ever build a
subway under Beirut ... A good massacre or two will drive the Palestinians out
of Beirut and Lebanon once and for all. [124]
The Israeli Army command
had also enlisted leading Lebanese officers. One of them revealed:
During Thursday, General
Drori, took me to the airport where Israelis were assembling the militia. “If
your men won’t do it, I know others who will.” [125]
He referred to Saqr. "... The
Guardians of the Cedars, whom Gemayel incorporated into the Lebanese Forces in
1980, held, as an article of faith, that Palestinian infants must be killed
since they eventually grew up to be terrorists." [126]
Each Of You Is An Avenger
The brutality of the
invasion and occupation of Lebanon and the chilling horror of the massacres in
Sabra and Shatila once again removed the mask from the cruel face of Zionism.
Television and newspaper coverage of the war produced a worldwide outcry,
forcing Israel to dissimulate and to appoint an official Commission of Inquiry.
The Israeli government conducted its own investigation under the Kahan
Commission.
The "investigation"
concluded, predictably, that the Israelis were merely negligent in
underestimating "Arab blood lust," but had no direct role in the
massacre of Sabra and Shatila.
The German weekly Der
Spiegel, however, carried an interview on February 14, 1983, with one
of the killer militia, who recounted not only his own role in the slaughter,
but described direct Israeli participation.
The article was entitled Each
Of You Is An Avenger, and the first person account could have come from
the Nuremberg Trials:
We met in the Schahrur
wadi, in the valley of the nightingales Southeast of Beirut. It was Wednesday,
the fifteenth of September ... We were approximately three hundred men from
East Beirut, South Lebanon and the Akkar Mountains in the north ... I belonged
to the Tiger Militia of ex-President Camile Chamoun.
Phalange officers summoned us and
brought us to the meeting place. They told us that they needed us for a
“special action” ... “You are the agents of good,” the officers told us
repeatedly. “Each of you is an avenger.” ...
Then a good dozen Israelis in green
uniforms without indication of rank came along. They had playing cards with
them and spoke Arabic well, except that like all Jews they pronounced the hard
“h” as “ch.” They were talking about the Palestinian camps Sabra and Shatila
... it was clear to us what we were to do, and we were looking forward to it.
We had to swear an oath never to
divulge anything about our action. At about 10 p.m. we climbed into an American
army truck that the Israelis had given over to us. We parked the vehicle near
the airport tower. There, immediately next to the Israeli positions, several
such trucks were already parked.
Some Israelis in Phalange uniforms
were with the Party. “The Israeli friends who accompany you,” our officers told
us “... will make your work easier.” They directed us not to make use of our
firearms, if at all possible. “Everything must proceed noiselessly.” ... We saw
other comrades. They had to do their work with bayonets and knives. Bloody
corpses were lying in the alleys. The half-asleep women and children who cried
out for help put our whole plan in danger, alarming the entire camp.
Now I saw once again the Israelis
who had been at our secret meeting. One signalled us to move back to areas of
the camp entrance. The Israelis opened up with all their guns. The Israelis
helped us with floodlights.
There were shocking scenes that
showed what the Palestinians were good for. A few, including women, had taken
shelter in a small alley, behind some donkeys. Unfortunately we had to shoot
down these poor animals to finish off the Palestinians behind them. It got to
me when the animals cried out in pain. It was gruesome.
A comrade entered a house full of
women and children. The Palestinians screamed and threw their gas stoves on the
ground. We sent the hard-hearted rabble to hell.
At about four in the morning my
squad went back to the truck. When there was morning light we went back into
the camp. We went past bodies, stumbled over bodies, shot and stabbed all
eyewitnesses. Killing others was easy once you have done it a few times.
Now came the Israeli Army
bulldozers. “Plow everything under the ground. Don’t let any witnesses stay
alive.” But despite our efforts, the area was still teeming with people. They
ran about and caused awful confusion. The order to “plow them under” demanded
too much.
It became clear that the pretty
plan had failed. Thousands had escaped us. Far too many Palestinians are still
alive. Everywhere now people are talking about a massacre and feeling sorry for
the Palestinians. Who appreciates the hardships that we took upon ourselves ...
Just think. I fought for twenty-four hours in Shatila without food or drink.
The death toll in Sabra
and Shatila was over 3,000. Many of the mass graves were never opened.
Destroying Lebanon
The slaughter and
dispersal of the Palestinian people was one component of Israeli strategy.
Another was the decimation of the vital Lebanese economy which, despite Israeli
efforts, had emerged as the finance capital of the Middle East.
Twenty thousand Palestinians and
Lebanese died, 25,000 were wounded and 400,000 were made homeless during the
first months of the 1982 Israeli invasion. The tonnages dropped on Beirut alone
surpassed those of the atomic bomb which devastated Hiroshima. Schools and
hospitals were particularly targeted.
Virtually all rolling stock and
heavy equipment from Lebanese factories were looted and taken to Israel. Even
the lathes and smaller machine tools from the U.N.R.W.A. vocational training
centers were pillaged.
The citrus and olive production of
Lebanon south of Beirut was destroyed. The Lebanese economy, whose exports had
competed with Israel’s, became moribund. The south of Lebanon became an Israeli
market even as the headwaters of the Litani River, like the Jordan River before
it, were diverted by the Israelis.
The author of this book experienced
the bombing and siege of West Beirut in 1982, lived with Palestinians in the ruins
of Ain El Helweh during Israeli occupation and witnessed the devastation in the
Palestinian camps of Rashidya, El Bas, Burj al lamali, Mieh Mieh, Burj al
Burajneh, Sabra and Shatila, as well as the destruction of the Lebanese towns
and villages throughout the south.
The accounts of Israeli enactment
of the massacre of Sabra and Shatila have been substantiated by this author,
who was present in the camps on the final day of slaughter. He and Mya Shone
photographed Israeli tanks and soldiers in Sabra and Shatila and spoke to the
survivors over a period of four days.
Notes
113. Jonathan Randal. Going
All The Way (New York: Viking, 1983), p.188.
114. Letter to Prime
Minister Moshe Sharett. February 27, 1954. Rokach, p.25.
115. Randal.
116. Ibid.,
p.247.
117. Norwegian social
worker Marianne Helle Möller, cited in Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone, Towards
A Final Solution in the Lebanon?, New Society, August 19,
1982.
118. Randal.
119. Cited in a leaflet
distributed in Sidon by Major Saqr, February 1983.
120. Time
Magazine, October 4, 1982.
121. New York
Times, October 1, 1982.
122. Jerusalem
Post, July 23, 1982.
123. Jerusalem
Post, October 1983.
124. Randal, p.17.
125. Ibid.
126. Ibid.
Chapter 9
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Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon
and Shimon Peres have, at different times, expressed the conviction that
"the lesson of Lebanon" would pacify, by example, the Palestinians of
the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
This pacification, however, had
been underway for twenty-one years since their occupation in 1967. Many in the
West Bank and Gaza were refugees of earlier Israe1i depredations from 1947 to
1967.
In the post-1967 territories of
occupation, a Palestinian cannot plant a tomato without an unobtainable permit
from the military government. He or she cannot plant an eggplant without such a
permit. You cannot whitewash your house. You can’t fix a pane of glass. You
can’t sink a well. You can’t wear a shirt which has the colors of the
Palestinian flag. You can’t have a cassette in your house which has Palestinian
national songs.
Since 1967, more than 300,000
Palestinian youth have passed through Israeli prisons under conditions of
institutional torture. Amnesty International concluded that there is no country
in the world in which the use of official and sustained torture is as
well-established and documented as in the case of the state of Israel.
Twenty-one years after the Israeli
seizure of Gaza, the Los Angeles Times described its consequences:
Only about 2,200 Jewish
settlers live in the Gaza Strip, which was captured from Egypt, but they occupy
about 30% of the 135 square mile area. More than 650,000 Palestinians, mostly
refugees, are squeezed into about half the strip, making it one of the most
densely populated areas in the world. The rest of Gaza’s land has been
designated restricted border zones by the army. [127]
Civil Rights and the Law
Arrest
In all territory under
Israeli military occupation, any soldier or policeman has the right to detain
an individual should he believe he has "grounds to suspect" that the
person in question has committed an offense. The law does not set out the
nature of the infraction suspected by the soldier to have been committed or
planned.[128]
The deliberately vague nature of
this statute has the consequence of denying to Palestinians in the territories
occupied since 1967 any means of knowing why they may be arrested and detained.
Upon arrest for suspicion, a
Palestinian may be detained for eighteen days with the approval of a police
officer.
Once arrested, a Palestinian
detainee can be (and virtually always is) denied access to a lawyer. The formal
regulation provides that the Prison Administrator decide whether or not a
lawyer may be permitted to see a client.
Routinely, prison officials rule
that for a prisoner to meet with an attorney before interrogation is complete
would be to "hinder the process of interrogation." [129] This
decision can extend through the duration of detention. As a result, lawyers
gain access to a prisoner only after that prisoner has confessed or after the
security services have decided to terminate the interrogation.
Lawyers in Israel maintain that the
reason for this arrangement is that the focal point of interrogation is to
obtain a confession. To achieve that end the authorities invariably subject a
prisoner to isolation, torture and insupportable physical conditions.
Upon arrest, a detainee undergoes a
period of starvation, deprivation of sleep by organized methods and prolonged
periods during which the prisoner is made to stand with hands cuffed and
raised, a filthy sack covering the head. Prisoners are dragged on the ground,
beaten with objects, kicked, summarily stripped and placed under ice-cold
showers. Verbal abuse and physical humiliation are commonplace involving such acts
as spitting or urinating into a prisoner’s mouth and forcing the prisoner to
crawl around in a crowded cell.
The interrogation can go on for
several months until such time as the individual confesses and a charge can
thus be drawn up. If the prisoner does not break under torture and agree to
confess, he or she may be detained administratively, without being charged or
brought to trial.
Confessions
The coerced confession is
central to proceedings against Palestinian prisoners. Until 1981 a prisoner could
be tried only on the basis of his or her personal confession - a sufficient
inducement for prison authorities to produce one for the court. Wasfi O. Masri,
who had been a senior judge under Jordanian rule and who defends many
Palestinian prisoners has stated:
In 90% of the cases I
have, the prisoner ... was beaten and tortured. [130]
Because many prisoners
withstood torture and refused to confess, an amendment to the military statute
was adopted, permitting courts to use as the central and, indeed, sole evidence
against a defendant the fact that his or her name was mentioned in someone
else’s confession.
While "evidence" is
considered inculpating if a defendant’s name is cited in another prisoner’s
confession, the prosecution’s case is treated as definitive if a defendant’s
confession is produced. If a detainee fails to admit to an offense, officers of
the Intelligence Services are brought into court to testify that the prisoner
made an "oral" confession. Palestinian attorney Mohammed Na’amneh, in
describing two such cases, observed that when prisoners deny having confessed
orally, the court accepts an Intelligence Officer’s testimony as probative.
[131]
All confessions are written in
Hebrew, a language virtually none of the Palestinians from the territories
occupied since 1967 is able to read. When prisoners refuse to sign on the
ground that they cannot read Hebrew, they are abused. In the case of Shehadeh
Shalaldeh of Ramallah, “the officer left the room and two men in civilian
clothes came in. I told them I wanted to know what I was signing ... They
started beating me, so I said "Okay, okay, I’ll sign’.” [132]
There are many cases
wherein the statement which a prisoner has signed in Hebrew bears no relation
to the Arabic text originally shown him. Such confessions invariably begin:
“I was a member of a
terrorist organization.
These words would never
be used by a member of the P.L.O. (Palestine Liberation Organisation) or its
component organizations. Notwithstanding the fact that such
"confessions" are in a language which cannot be read by those signing
them, the courts have ruled that confessions are "irreversible" and
wholly probative of the offense in question.
Exact data on the percentage of
those arrested, interrogated and eventually brought to trial are difficult to
establish with precision. No published statistics exist. But the cumulative
information of lawyer and Palestinian community records make evident that the
number of Palestinians subjected to interrogation and torture is enormous.
Israeli lawyers state without
hesitation that most males over the age of sixteen have been interrogated and
held at one or another time in their lives for periods of varying duration. By
1980, reports printed in the Israeli press estimated the number of Palestinians
imprisoned at one or another time after 1967 to have reached 200,000. Lawyers
recently updated this figure to 300,000.
Trial
Those who reach trial are
charged most commonly with "political" offenses which include: 1)
Breaking public order (a vague category embracing any action including
insufficient subservience toward Israeli officials); 2) Demonstrating; 3)
Distributing leaflets or daubing slogans; 4) Membership in an
"illegal" organization. Specifically targeted are groups which
attempt to form any Palestinian political party in pre-1967 Israel such as El
Ard (The Land), which does not support explicitly a Jewish state, or
representative Palestinian bodies, such as the National Guidance Committee (Lijni
Komite al Watani) in the West Bank. Organizations which are part of the
P.L.O. are also among those declared illegal.
Many youngsters in the Occupied
Territories who strike, march, demonstrate or meet, are charged with
"producing or throwing Molotov cocktails". A significant number of
people are tried for possession of arms, armed assault and forms of military
operation and sabotage. Many of these cases involve, in fact, violation of the
"contact with the enemy" provision, which covers any organization
designated by Israeli security forces as sympathetic to Palestinian national
aspirations.
Within ten years of the occupation,
over 60% of all prisoners in pre-l967 Israel and the territories occupied since
1967 were Palestinians found guilty of political offenses. All political
offenses violate the Defense Emergency Regulations of 1945 and the State
Security, Foreign Relations and Official Secrets Act of 1967, thus making them
"security offenses".
People charged with such political
offenses are brought to trial in military courts. This is true inside pre-1967
Israel as well as the territories occupied subsequently. Palestinians are
rarely tried in civil court.
The Defense Emergency Regulations
Under the Emergency
Regulations, a military commander (currently the Military Governor) can, at his
discretion and without judicial review.
·
imprison people indefinitely
·
prohibit travel within or outside pre-1967 Israel and the territories
occupied since 1967
·
expel an individual permanently
·
restrict any person to his or her home, locality, village or town
·
forbid anyone to make use of his or her own property
·
order the demolition of homes
·
impose police surveillance on any individual and order him or her to
report to a police station several times a day
·
declare any area closed as a security zone, whether it be a farm owned
by a family, an inhabited village, refugee camp or tribal lands
·
censor all media, requiring all articles, leaflets and books to be
approved, and banning their distribution
·
raid people’s homes and confiscate entire libraries
·
forbid the gathering of ten or more people for the purpose of discussing
politics
·
forbid membership in an organization.
Military edicts appended
to the Defense Emergency Regulations have proliferated to the point where they
impinge upon the minutiae of Palestinian existence. Military Orders affecting
the West Bank:
·
forbid the planting of tomatoes or eggplant without written permission
·
forbid the planting of any fruit tree without written permission
·
forbid any repairs to a house or structure without written permission
·
forbid the sinking of wells for drinking water or irrigation.
The Defense Emergency
Regulations, first adopted by the British to control the Palestinian population
within the Mandate, were revised in 1945 and used by the British to control
armed attacks on British soldiers by the Irgun and Haganah and to restrict
Zionist acquisition of land. The Regulations were condemned in 1946 by the
Hebrew Lawyers Union in the following terms:
The powers given to the
ruling authority in the Emergency Regulations deny the inhabitants of Palestine
their basic human rights. These regulations undermine the foundation of law and
justice; they constitute a serious danger to individual freedom, and they
institute a regime of arbitrariness without any judicial supervision. [133]
Yaakov Shimpshon Shapira,
who was later to become a Minister of Justice for the state of Israel and one
of its leading legal authorities, proclaimed:
The regime built in
Palestine on the Defense Emergency Regulations has no parallel in any civilized
nation. Even in Nazi Germany there were no such laws and the Nazi deeds of
Mayadink and other similar things were against the code of laws. Only in an
occupied country do you find a system resembling ours ... [l34]
Notwithstanding these
assessments by leading Zionist authorities in jurisprudence, the Defense
Emergency Regulations were incorporated into the legal system of the state of
Israel. Since the founding of the state in 1948, the basic regulations have
remained unchanged.
The irony is evident. The
very regulations characterized by the man who would become Israel’s Minister of
Justice as "unparalleled in any civilized country" and condemned by
Zionist lawyers for denying "basic human rights" were adopted as the
law of the land. As Yaakov Shimshon Shapira stressed: "Only in an occupied
country do you find a system resembling ours ..." The Palestinian people,
whether in pre-1967 Israel, East Jerusalem, the West Bank or the Gaza Strip
live in an occupied country.
Notes
127. Dan Fisher, Los
Angeles Times, November 11, 1987.
128. Lea Tsemel, Prison
Conditions in Israel - An Overview, November 16, 1982, p.1. Included in
Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone, Prisoners of Israel: The Treatment of
Palestinian Prisoners in Three Jurisdictions (Princeton, N.J.: Veritas
Press, 1984).
129. National Lawyers
Guild, Treatment of Palestinians in Israeli-Occupied West Bank and Gaza
(New York: 1978), p.89.
130. London Sunday
Times, June 19, 1977.
131. Mohammed Na’amneh,
Interview with the author, East Jerusalem, February 2, 1983.
132. London Sunday
Times, June 19, 1977. p.18.
133. Arie Bober, ed., The
Other Israel: The Radical Case Against Zionism (New York: Anchor
Books, 1972), p.134.
134. Sabri Jiryis, The
Arabs In Israel (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), p.12.
Chapter 10
The Prevalence of Torture
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Chapter
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Israeli prisons are
essentially political prisons. They contain mainly Palestinians suspected,
accused and occasionally – on the basis of coerced confessions – “convicted” of
carrying out, abetting or planning acts of resistance, whether peaceful or
armed. While statistics for the total prison population are not available, the
number of prisoners in maximum-security prisons who are serving long-term
sentences consistently hovers around 3,000; thirty Palestinian women are
imprisoned in Neve Tertza, not including those women brought from Lebanon.
Lawyers estimate that prior to the recent uprising 20,000 Palestinians were
imprisoned each year.
Within the pre-1967 borders there
are ten prisons, including Kfar Yonah, Ramle Central Prison, Shattah, Damun,
Mahaneh Ma'siyahu, Beersheba, Tel Mond (for juveniles), Nafha, Ashkelon and
Neve Tertza.
Nine prisons are located in the
post-1967 Occupied Territories: Gaza, Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Fara'a,
Jericho, Tulkarm, Hebron and Jerusalem.
There are regional detention
centers at Yagur (Jalameh) and Atlit near Haifa, Abu Kabir in Tel Aviv and the
Moscobiya (Russian Compound) in Jerusalem. In addition, police headquarters in
Haifa, Acre, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, the eighteen police stations throughout the
state and the forty police outposts in the occupied territories are used to
detain suspects for interrogation and torture. [152] Military installations throughout the country
also serve as interrogation and torture centers. Prisoners agree that the most
savage of these is Armon ha-Avadon known as the “Palace of Hell” and “Palace of
the End”. It is located at Mahaneh Tzerffin near Sarafand.
Finally, detention camps with only
tents for shelter were erected to maintain the large numbers of Palestinian
prisoners brought from Lebanon during the 1982 invasion as well as the youths
rounded up during the current resistance. Meggido, Ansar II (in Gaza) and
Dhariyah have become detention centers notorious for their inhumane conditions
and daily routine of torture.
Distinctions in Treatment
The differences between
prisons for Palestinians within the post-1967 Occupied Territories and those
within pre-1967 Israel, i.e., within the “Green Line”, are not great. Ashkelon
prison, Nafha prison, the main wing of Beersheba prison and the special wing of
Ramle prison, while located within pre-1967 Israel, are major detention centers
for Palestinians from the post-1967 Occupied Territories of the West Bank and
Gaza. Damun and Tel Mond are used for Palestinian youth.
The physical location of prisons
has little bearing on conditions. Israeli prison authorities maintain rigorous
segregation between persons held on criminal charges and those convicted of
“security offences”, who are political prisoners.
As only a small number of Jews
qualify as political prisoners and only a small number of Palestinians,
particularly from the Occupied Territories, are criminal offenders, this
separation entails de-facto segregation between Jewish prisoners and
Palestinian detainees. Neither contact nor communication is allowed. They are
either in separate prisons or different wings of the same institution.
Distinctions are also made between
Palestinian prisoners from the territory occupied after 1967 and “Israeli Arab”
inmates, who are Palestinian and Druze residing in pre-1967 Israel and holding
Israeli citizenship. Conditions of imprisonment for prisoners from the West
Bank and Gaza are many times worse than those of pre-1967 “Israeli” inmates.
Some, but not all, prisoners from
pre-1967 Israel are allowed a bed or mattress. Approximately 70% of these
Israeli prisoners enjoy this “privilege”. They also may receive one visit every
two weeks and send two letters a month. They are allowed three blankets in
summer and five in winter.
Prisoners from the post-1967
Occupied Territories sleep on the floor during summer and winter. They are
allowed a rubber mat one quarter of an inch [0.5 cm.] thick, one visit and one
post card a month.
Whereas the average living space
per prisoner in European and American prisons is 112.5 square feet [10.5m2],
in prisons for Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, it is one tenth this
area or l6 square feet [1.5m2] per prisoner.
The prison bureaucracy is a law
unto itself. Upon entering this domain the citizen loses all rights. He or she
becomes subject to wholly arbitrary authority wielded by people selected for
their harshness.
The Prison Ordinance (revised 1971)
has 114 clauses. There is no clause or sub-clause defining prisoner rights. The
ordinance provides a legally binding set of rules for the Minister of the
Interior, but the Minister himself formulates these rules by administrative
decree.
There is no provision stipulating
obligations incumbent upon the authorities nor is there any clause guaranteeing
prisoners a minimum standard of life.
In Israel, it is legally
permissible to intern twenty inmates in a cell no more than 15 feet [5m.] long,
12 feet [4m.] wide and 9 feet [3m.] high. This space includes an open lavatory.
Prisoners may be confined indefinitely to such cells for twenty-three hours a
day.
The Kutler Report
An extensive inquiry into
the physical conditions inside prisons located within pre-1967 Israel was
published in Ha'aretz in 1978 by Israeli journalist, Yair Kutler. Yair Kutler
called prison life in Israel “hell on earth” and proceeded to describe each
prison in detail. [153] His account is harrowing:
Kfar Yonah: Senior officials name the prison of Kfar
Yonah as “Kevar Yonah” (the grave of Yonah). It is the detention center that
terrifies all who pass through its gates. Detainees have named it “Meurat
Petanim” or “The Lair of Cobras”. “The reception awaiting those remanded there
until trial is frightening.” Cells are extremely cold and damp. The shabby,
torn and filthy mattresses are crowded. Most detainees have nowhere to lie but
the floor. The overwhelming stench of human excretion, sweat and filth never
fades from the locked and bolted cells. In ‘D’ wing there are three rooms into
which twelve, eighteen and twenty detainees are crammed.
Central Prison of
Ramle: Ramle is one of
the harshest prisons in Israel. It is a former British police station that was
once used as a stable for horses. It is overcrowded and stinking, packed with
seven hundred inmates. Many prisoners do not have a bed, a small corner or even
a few square meters for themselves. Frequently one hundred men must lie on the
floor.
There are twenty-one isolation
cells (‘X’s) in Ramle. Sunlight never penetrates into the isolation cells,
which are completely sealed off. A dangling bulb gives off light the whole day
long.
In addition to the isolation cells,
Ramle has a series of dungeons. They are 6 feet long, 3 feet wide and 6 feet
high [2m. by 80cm. by 2m.]. They are dark, filthy and give off a terrible
stench. There are no windows or light bulbs; a small opening in the door lets
in a little of the light from the corridor.
Before a prisoner is placed in the
dungeon cell he is stripped naked and given a torn, thin overall. Once a day he
may be let out to use the toilet; otherwise he must contain himself for the
entire day and night.
He can urinate through a wire mesh
in the door. The prisoner is allowed neither a daily walk nor a shower.
Frequently there are beatings. The
favored mode is the “blanket method”. A few guards cover the prisoner’s head
and beat him until he falls unconscious.
In order to avoid solitary confinement
a prisoner must know how to lead a life of total submission and self-abasement.
Damun: Life in Damun is “hell on earth”. “The
living conditions are disgraceful and cause revulsion in every visitor who
comes to this God forsaken place.” The buildings absorb the damp and cold. Five
blankets would not be sufficient to keep warm. “Many are sick and most are
despairing.” The youth wing of Damun has even worse conditions. Overcrowding is
so terrible that youths can only stretch their limbs for two hours every
fortnight and this interval is often missed.
Shattah: Overcrowding is terrible in Shattah. The
stench is felt at a far distance ... The cells are dark, damp and chilly. The
air is suffocating. In summer during the period of great heat in the Beit Shean
valley, the prison is a blazing hell.
Sarafand: The “Palace of the End” is set behind a
high wire fence seen by all tourists as they drive on the last section of road
from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, but five miles from Ben Gurion airport. This is the
perimeter of Sarafand which is ten miles square and Israel’s largest army
ordinance and supply depot. It is also the repository of the Jewish National
Fund, which uses Sarafand to store equipment for construction of new
settlements in pre-1967 Israel and the post-1967 Occupied Territories.
The inexorable relationship between
occupation, settlement, colonization and the system of torture visited upon
Palestinians becomes evident. Sarafand – the torture center – has historical
significance.
It was built prior to World War II
and served as the principal ordinance depot for Britain. It was one of the most
notorious camps for detainees during the Palestinian uprising in 1936 against
British rule and Zionist colonization of the land. The old British Mandate
buildings were simply taken over by Israeli authorities, their function
unaltered, and used for a new generation of Palestinian detainees. The center,
known by Palestinian and Jew alike during the British era as the “concentration
camp”, has been maintained in character and use.
Nafha – A
Political Prison:
Palestinian political prisoners have not received the status of Prisoners of
War but prisoner camps are constructed for them. Nafha is called “the political
prison “ by its inhabitants.
It is in the desert, eight kilometers
from Mitzoe Ramon and half way between Beersheba and Eilat. It is in a barren
area with terrible sandstorms. Sand penetrates everything. Nights are extremely
cold and the daytime heat is unbearable. Snakes and scorpions roam the cells.
A typical cell is 18 feet by 9 feet
[6m. by 3m.]. There are ten mattresses on the floor and no other space. A
primitive lavatory occupies one corner. Above the lavatory is a shower. While
one prisoner uses the toilet, others must wash themselves or their dishes. In a
room such as this, ten prisoners spend twenty-three hours a day. One half hour
a day all the prisoners must walk in a small concrete yard 15 feet by 45 feet
[5m. by 15m.] Many prisoners are ill, suffering from the effects of repeated
torture and brutal prison living conditions. [154]
Daily Practice in Israeli Prisons
Political prisoners have
frequently declared that the conditions in the detention centers and prisons
both in pre-1967 Israel and the post-1967 Occupied Territories are designed to
destroy them both physically and psychically.
Beatings: In all prisons in pre-1967 Israel and the
Occupied Territories prisoners are beaten. In Ramle, this is performed in the
dungeons or “isolation cells”: A number of warders attack the prisoner and beat
him with their fists, boots and clubs made from wooden hoe handles which are
kept in a closet adjacent to the dungeon cells.
In Damun prison, beating is done
more primitively. It is performed in public in the courtyard. The most brutal
guards are in charge of the “Post”. This is the prisoner transport vehicle
which makes three trips weekly from the detention center in Abu Kabir to
Shattah prison. It stops at all prisons inside Israel except Ashkelon and
Beersheba. Every trip of the “Post” results in savage beatings. Given the
slightest pretext, Post guards take the victim off the vehicle at the next Post
stations and “beat him beyond recognition”.
Isolation: Isolation is not regarded as punishment
under the law.
In reality, few people can survive
many months in cells 3 feet [1 m.] by 8 feet [2.5m.] for twenty-three hours a
day. Yet no prisoner who has made any verbal attempt to preserve self-respect
has avoided periods in the isolation cells.
Labour: Prison labour is forced labour. It is organized
as “a means to harass the lives of prisoners”. [155] Political prisoners are deliberately assigned
production of boots for the Israeli army, camouflage nets, etc.. Those who
refuse are denied such “privileges” as cash for the canteen, time out of cells,
books or newspapers and writing materials.
Some are punished with isolation.
The average wage for this labor is
$.05 per hour. Forced labour is deployed to maximize physical and emotional
stress. It is also a means of exploitation.
Food: Nutrition in prisons is deficient and food
budgets are minimal. Allocated meat, vegetables and fruits are often
sequestered by the staff. Eggs, milk and a fresh tomato are categorized as
prisoner luxuries.
Medical
Treatment: In 1975, a
prisoner in Damun prison cut his wrists and legs. Fellow inmates called the
guard. A delegation of three guards arrived. The medical orderly opened the
cell and grabbed the prisoner and without uttering a word clubbed the man’s
face repeatedly. The prisoner fell to the floor; the medical worker kicked him
incessantly.
Prisoners are jailed in unsuitable
buildings. They suffer in summer from exhausting heat. In winter the damp
penetrates “to the bone”. In Ramle prison during winter, one-third of the
prison population suffers from swelling of the hands and feet due to severe
chill. The only medication available is vaseline, but even it is rarely
allowed.
Detainees who serve sentences of
more than a few months leave prison with permanent disabilities. Lighting
conditions are so poor that prisoners suffer from deterioration of eyesight.
Kidney ailments and ulcers have an incidence among inmates five times that of
the general population.
Asafir: Since 1977, prisoners have reported that
torture is also administered by a small group of collaborators in each prison,
some of whom are not actual prisoners but informers posing as such. Whether
prisoners who collaborate or informers insinuated into the prison, the
procedure has been institutionalized. In each prison and detention center,
special rooms are set aside for the collaborators, who are known as “asafir” or
“song birds”. Common among the “asafir” are violent criminals selected for
their fierceness. Others are selected from those held on political charges,
even though they lack a political past. The latter are allowed privileges in
accordance with the services they perform.
Not Isolated Cases
While much is made of the
democratic and humanist pretensions of Israel, the evidence presented here, as
does the evidence accumulated in all studies of Zionist colonization and rule
in Palestine, strips away this facade.
The individual cases examined here
are not isolated nor are they the result of extraordinary circumstances. The
cases cited do not differ fundamentally from others. The torturers are not
aberrant individual cops who get out of hand. They are members of all sections
of Israeli police and security divisions operating in the line of duty.
Violence is the norm for dealing
with Palestinians, whether they are farmers taking their produce to market or
youths throwing stones, Palestinian citizens of pre-1967 Israel or Palestinian
residents of the territories occupied in 1967 and afterward. Torture is a
fundamental part of the legal system, coercion is the route to confession and
confession is fundamental to conviction.
The treatment of prisoners does not
change with the particular party in power. If Prime Minister Menachem Begin
categorized Palestinians as “two legged beasts”, the systematic brutality
imposed upon the Palestinian detainee is just as severe under the Labor
Alignment governments. As former Prime Minister David Ben Gurion said, “The
Military regime exists to defend the right of Jewish settlement everywhere”. [156]
NOTES
152. Jamil Ala’ al-Din and Melli Lerman, p.3.
153. Case Study: The Kutler Report. Ibid.,
pp.34-45.
154. Lea Tsemel and Walid Fahoum, Reports on Nafha Prison, May
1982-February 1983. Cited in Schoenman and Shone, pp.47-54.
155. Jamil Ala’ al-Din and Melli Lerman, p.26.
156. David Ben Gurion, Divray ha Knesset, Parliamentary Record #36, p.217. Cited in Bober, p.138.
|
Chapter 12
|
In 1982, while advance
preparations were being completed for the invasion of Lebanon and the massacre
of Palestinians in the camps around Beirut, Sidon and Tyre, a remarkable
document was published in Kivunim (Directions), the journal of
the Department of Information of the World Zionist Organization. Its author,
Oded Yinon, was formerly attached to the Foreign Ministry and reflects
high-level thinking in the Israeli military and intelligence establishment.
The article, A Strategy for
Israel in the 1980s, outlines a timetable for Israel to become the
imperial regional power based upon the dissolution of the Arab states. In
discussing the vulnerability of the corrupt regimes of the Middle East, Yinon
inadvertently exposes the full measure of their betrayal of the needs of the
population and their inability to defend themselves or their people against
imperial subjugation.
Divide and Rule
Yinon revives the idea of
former Labor Foreign Minister Abba Eban that the Arab East is a
"mosaic" of ethnic divergence. The form of rule, therefore,
appropriate to the region is the Millet system of the Ottoman Empire, wherein
administrative rule was based upon local functionaries presiding over discrete
ethnic communities.
"This world with its ethnic
minorities, its factions and internal crises, which is astonishingly
self-destructive, as we can see in Lebanon, in non-Arab Iran and now also in
Syria, is unable to deal successfully with its fundamental problems."[157]
Yinon contends that the Arab nation is a fragile shell waiting to be shattered
into multiple fragments. Israel must follow through with the policies it has
pursued since the inception of Zionism, seeking to purchase local agents among
factions and communal groups who will assert themselves against other such communities
at Israel’s behest.
This will always be feasible,
argues Yinon, because:
The Moslem Arab world is
built like a temporary house of cards, put together by foreigners (France and
Britain in the 1920’s), without the wishes and desires of the inhabitants
having been taken into account. It was arbitrarily divided into nineteen
states, all made of combinations of minorities and ethnic groups which are
hostile to one another, so that every Arab Moslem state nowadays faces ethnic
social destruction from within, and in some a civil war is already raging.
[158]
[Most of the Arabs, 118
million out of 170 million today, live in Africa, primarily in Egypt (45
million).]
The "new" strategy of the
eighties is the old imperial dictum of divide and rule, which depends for its
success upon the securing of corrupt satraps to do the bidding of an aspiring
imperial order.
In this giant and
fractured world there are a few wealthy groups and a huge mass of poor people.
Most of the Arabs have an average yearly income of $300. Lebanon is torn apart
and its economy is falling to pieces; there is no centralized power, but only
five de-facto sovereign authorities. [159]
Dissolving Lebanon
Lebanon was the model,
prepared for its role by the Israelis for thirty years, as the Sharett diaries
revealed. It is the expansionist compulsion set forth by Herzl and Ben Gurion
even as it is the logical extension of the Sharett diaries. The dissolution of
Lebanon was proposed in 1919, planned in 1936, launched in 1954 and realized in
1982.
Lebanon’s total
dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world
including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula and is already following
that track. The subsequent dissolution of Syria and Iraq into ethnically or religiously
unique areas, as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in
the long run. The dissolution of the military power of these states serves as
the primary short-term target. [160]
Fragmenting Syria
“Syria will fall apart,
in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such
as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi’ite Alawi state along
its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus
hostile to its northern neighbor and the Druze who will set up a state, maybe
even in our Golan [the Golan Heights was occupied by Israel in 1967], and
certainly in the Hauran and in northern Jordan. This state of affairs will be
the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run, and that aim
is already within our reach today."[161] Each Arab state is examined with
a view to assessing how it may be disassembled. Wherever minority religious
groupings are present in the army, Yinon sees opportunity. Syria is singled out
in this respect.
"The Syrian army today is
mostly Sunni with an Alawi officer corps, the Iraqi army Shi’ite with Sunni
commanders. This has great significance in the long run, and that is why it
will not be possible to retain the loyalty of the army for a long
time."[162] Yinon proceeds to examine how the "civil war," which
had been inflicted on Lebanon by means of financing Major Sa’ad Haddad in the
Lebanese South and the Gemayels’ Phalange around Beirut, may be extended to
Syria.
Syria is fundamentally no
different from Lebanon except in the strong military regime which rules it. But
the real civil war taking place nowadays between the Sunni majority and the
Shi’ite Alawi ruling minority (a mere 12% of the population) testifies to the
severity of the domestic trouble. [163]
The Assault on Iran
The revolutionary
insurgency against the Shah of Iran - one of the principal clients of American
imperialism, imposed by a C.I.A. coup in 1953 - appeared to open the road to
revolution throughout the Middle East. Not only did Israel and its U.S. patron
fear the appeal to Shi’ite Muslims throughout the region - who tended to be
among the poor and disadvantaged - but the challenge to U.S. domination struck
a chord amongst the masses in each ethnic group and nation.
This was the background to the
unleashing of an attack by Iraq on Iran’s southern province, Khuzistan, where
the oil production and refineries were located. Like Yinon, Israeli and U.S.
planners calculated that since Iran’s oil rich province was populated by Iran’s
Arab minority, the province could be detached from Iran relatively easily. An
attack by Iraq was expected to be met by sympathy from the Arab minority of
Khuzistan. Iran is a nation consisting of ethnic groupings: 15 million Persians
(Farsi), 12 million Turks, 6 million Arabs, 3 million Kurds, Baluchi, Turkmeni
and smaller nationalities.
Almost half of Iran’s
population is comprised of a Persian-speaking group and the other half of an
ethnically Turkish group. Turkey’s population comprises a Turkish Sunni Moslem
majority (some 50%) and two large minorities, 12 million Shi’ite Alawis and 6
million Sunni Kurds. In Afghanistan there are 5 million Shi’ites who constitute
one-third of the population. In Sunni Pakistan there are 15 million Shi’ites
who endanger the existence of that state. [l64]
The assumption was that
Iran, too, could be fragmented, severing the oil producing provinces through
invasion. Khomeini had continued the Shah’s policies of oppressing national
minorities and the repression visited upon the Arab minority by Khomeini’s
provincial governor, Admiral Madani, encouraged the C.I.A. and Israeli Mossad
to push the Iraqi regime to invade.
As with the other regimes of the
Arab East, rhetoric aside, the military oligarchies and monarchies in power are
available to the highest bidder. But the oil workers in Abadan and Ahwaz, the
refining cities of Iran’s Khuzistan province, were highly politicized. They had
been the backbone of the National Front when Mossadegh nationalized the
Anglo-Iranian Oil Corporation in 1952, and the Communist Party of Iran (Tudeh)
had a strong presence among the oil workers. It was the general strike led by
the oil workers which was decisive in the Iranian revolution which overthrew
the Shah in 1979.
Iraq’s invasion backfired. The Arab
minority saw it as an attack on the revolution itself. U.S. and Israeli policy
now turned to arming both sides, drawing out the war as long as possible, while
preventing an Iranian victory.
Yinon is clear about the strategy.
"Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run
and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into
denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon." [165] The United States and the
Saudi monarchy (which also supports Syria with a $10 billion subsidy) have
coordinated an arms blockade of Iran and the massive supply of arms to Iraq.
The Egyptian and Jordanian regimes lead the way in support for Iraq. Meanwhile
the Soviet Union and the United States each arm Iraq, as the Soviet bureaucratic
leadership seeks to use its influence on the Arab regimes to position itself to
make sphere of influence arrangements with U.S. rulers - at the expense of the
Arab masses who continue to live in poverty.
Targeting Iraq
Yinon makes explicit
Israeli motives in arming Khomeini while the United States arms Iraq:
"Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is
guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more
important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short
run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An
Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even
before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us."
[166]
Advanced preparations are in place
as the Zionists plan the fragmentation of Iraq in civil war. "The seeds of
inner conflict and civil war are apparent today already, especially after the
rise of Khomeini to power in Iran, a leader whom the Shi’ites in Iraq view as
their natural leader." [167] In discussing the weaknesses of Arab society
under the present regimes, Yinon, inadvertently, underlines the extent to which
the population is left out of the equation of power and decision making, the
unrepresentative nature of the Arab regimes, their consequent vulnerability and
the futility of their attempts to protect themselves from Zionist expansion by
dependence on U.S. power and influence. When all is said and done, they are all
being measured for the same fate.
What is at issue is not if, but
when:
Iraq is, once again, no
different in essence from its neighbors, although its majority is Shi’ite and
the ruling minority, Sunni. Sixty-five percent of the population has no say in
politics, in which an elite of twenty percent holds the power. In addition,
there is a large Kurdish minority in the north, and if it weren’t for the
strength of the ruling regime, the army and the oil revenues, Iraq’s future
state would be no different than that of Lebanon in the past or of Syria. [168]
The plan to dissolve the
Iraqi state is not algebraic. Israel has marked out the number of statelets,
where they are to be located and over whom they are to preside.
In Iraq, a division into
provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is
possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities:
Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi’ite areas in the south will separate from the
Sunni and Kurdish north. [169]
Israel seeks to take full
advantage of the impact of poverty and the consequent instability of the
regimes which must control an alienated population. In this regard the desire
of the Zionists to destabilize the Arab regimes and fragment their countries,
while not unwelcome to the United States, is met by Pentagon caution as to
timing and implementation. There is the constant danger that the wars and
manipulated internal divisions required by Zionism and U.S. imperialism to
control the region may unleash a popular uprising, as in Iran - and now within
the West Bank and Gaza.
The specter of revolutionary change
haunts both Israeli and American rulers. It is a prospect, as well, which
underlines the critical importance of a revolutionary leadership which will see
the struggle through to the end. The P.L.O.’s attempts, for example, to solicit
support from the oppressive regimes of the region instead of appealing directly
to their suffering populations have led the P.L.O. from one blind alley to
another.
The default in leadership is
commensurate with the opportunities lost. Describing the oppression meted out
by Arab regimes to their own national minorities, Yinon observes: "When
this picture is added to the economic one, we see how the entire region is
built like a house of cards, unable to withstand its severe problems."
[170] Every country analyzed reveals, essentially, the same set of conditions.
"All the Arab states east of Israel are torn apart, broken up and riddled
with inner conflict even more than those of the Maghreb (North Africa)."
[171]
Double-Crossing Mubarak
The cynicism with which
the Zionists discuss the fiction of their concern for "security" is
nowhere more transparent than in Yinon’s assessment of Egypt. The emergence of
Sadat after Israel’s seizure of the Sinai, West Bank, Gaza and Golan Heights in
1967 presented the United States with the opportunity to prevent the most
populous Arab state from remaining an obstacle to Israeli expansion and
American control. The removal of Egypt from opposition was a devastating blow,
not merely to the Palestinian people but to the entire Arab population.
The return of Egypt to a degree of
dependency on imperialism unknown in the days of Farouk was deeply unpopular
among Egyptians.
The United States has provided
Egypt with nearly $3 billion in aid, loans and disguised subsidy - second only
to Israel itself - which underlines the role of the Mubarak government. Yet
living standards plummet.
By legitimizing the Israeli
colonial state, Sadat betrayed not only the Palestinian people but left the
Arab East prey to the designs set forth by Oded Yinon.
What emerges clearly from his
strategic analysis is that for the Zionist movement everything is on a
timetable, each area marked for conquest or re-conquest and perceived as a
target of opportunity, awaiting only the proper relation of forces and the
cover of war.
Egypt, in its present
domestic political picture is already a corpse, all the more so if we take into
account the growing Moslem-Christian rift. Breaking Egypt down territorially
into distinct geographical regions is the political aim of Israel in the
Nineteen Eighties on its Western front. [172]
Sadat’s return of Egypt
to its neo-colonial status under Farouk was rewarded by the recovery of the
Sinai. In Israeli eyes, however, not for long.
Israel will be forced to
act directly or indirectly in order to regain control over Sinai as a strategic
economic and energy reserve for the long run. Egypt does not constitute a
military strategic problem due to its internal conflicts, and it could be
driven back to the post-1967 war situation in no more than one day. [173]
Yinon now proceeds to apply the
same scalpel to Egypt with which he has already sliced up Lebanon, Syria and
Iraq:
Egypt is divided and torn
apart into many foci of authority. If Egypt falls apart, countries like Libya,
Sudan or even the more distant states will not continue to exist in their
present form and will join the downfall and dissolution of Egypt. The vision of
a Christian Coptic state in Upper Egypt alongside a number of weak states with
very localized power and without a centralized government is the key to a
historical development which was only set back by the peace agreement but which
seems inevitable in the long run. [174]
Camp David, then, was a
tactical ploy preparatory to the dissolution of Egypt and of the Sudan:
Sudan, the most torn
apart state in the Arab Moslem world today is built upon four groups hostile to
each other: an Arab Moslem Sunni minority which rules over a majority of
non-Arab Africans, Pagans, and Christians. In Egypt there is a Sunni Moslem
majority facing a large minority of Christians which is dominant in upper
Egypt: some seven million of them. They will want a state of their own,
something like a ’second’ Christian Lebanon in Egypt. [175]
It was in Egypt that
Gamal Abdel Nasser had overthrown King Farouk and galvanized the Arab world
with his vision of Arab unity. But it was a unity based not on revolutionary
struggle throughout the region but on an illusory federation between
oligarchical regimes.
Tomorrow the Saudis
If Nasser’s Egypt
finished up, in Israel’s vision, "torn apart" like a second Lebanon,
Saudi Arabia will be far more vulnerable, for the Monarchy’s days are
considered numbered.
The entire Arabian
peninsula is a natural candidate for dissolution due to internal and external
pressures, and the matter is inevitable, especially in Saudi Arabia.
All the Gulf principalities and
Saudi Arabia are built upon a delicate house of sand in which there is only
oil. In Kuwait, the Kuwaitis constitute only a quarter of the population. In
Bahrain, the Shi’ites are the majority but are deprived of power. In the United
Arab Emirates, Shi’ites are once again the majority but the Sunnis are in
power. [176]
Nor is there much doubt
that as goes Arabia so goes the Gulf:
The same is true of Oman
and North Yemen. Even in the Marxist [sic] South Yemen there is a sizable
Shi’ite minority. In Saudi Arabia half the population is foreign, Egyptian and
Yemenite, but a Saudi minority holds power. [177]
Depopulating Palestine
Yinon reserves his most
relentless assessment for the Palestinians themselves. He is emphatic in
acknowledging that the Palestinian people have never relinquished their desire
and will to be sovereign in their country. It is all of Palestine over which
Zionism must rule.
Within Israel the
distinction between the areas of ’67 and the territories beyond them, those of
’48, has always been meaningless for Arabs and nowadays no longer has any
significance for us. [178]
Not only must
Palestinians be driven out of the West Bank and Gaza, but from the Galilee and
pre-1967 Israel. They are to be scattered as they were in 1948.
Dispersal of the
population is therefore a domestic strategic aim of the highest order;
otherwise, we shall cease to exist within any borders. Judea, Samaria and the
Galilee are our sole guarantee for national existence, and if we do not become
the majority in the mountain areas, we shall not rule in the country and we
shall be like the Crusaders, who lost this country which was not theirs anyhow,
and in which they were foreigners to begin with. Rebalancing the country
demographically, strategically and economically is the highest and most central
aim today. [179]
[Today, the Palestinians
within Israeli territorial control - those in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and
the pre-1967 territorial colonization - number approximately 2.5 million. There
are approximately 5.4 million Palestinians today. More than half of the
Palestinian people are dispersed and scattered in a Diaspora across the world.
A significant number are in the countries of the Arab East, where they are also
subjected to every form of persecution and discrimination: 37.8% in Syria,
Jordan and Lebanon; and 17.5% in other Arab states.]
The question posed is how to
achieve the expulsion of the Palestinian people under Israeli control,
particularly as Israel’s entire regional strategy depends upon it: “.Realizing
our aims on the Eastern front depends first on the realization of this internal
strategic objective." [180]
Jordan: The Short Run
The method by which this
is to be accomplished requires a delicate operation, which begins to explain
Zionist and American stress on Jordanian representation of the Palestinians.
Jordan constitutes an
immediate strategic target in the short run but not in the long run, for it
does not constitute a real threat in the long run after its dissolution, the
termination of the lengthy rule of King Hussein and the transfer of power to
the Palestinians in the short run. [emphasis added].
There is no chance that Jordan will
continue to exist in its present structure for a long time and Israel’s policy,
both in war and in peace, ought to be directed at the liquidation of Jordan
under the present regime and the transfer of power to the Palestinian majority.
[181]
A desert land with small
resources, largely dependent on Saudi money and both U.S. and Israeli military
protection, Jordan’s Hashemite Monarchy is scarcely sovereign at all. Its rule
over the Palestinian majority who inhabit camps even as they make up its civil
service, is Draconian. Palestinians have no right to political expression and
when deported from the West Bank and Gaza by Israel, they are summoned daily by
Jordanian police who harass and abuse them.
The removal of the Hashemite regime
is to be accompanied by what Jabotinsky, citing Hitler in 1940, euphemistically
had called "population transfer".
"Changing the regime
east of the river will also cause the termination of the problem of the
territories densely populated with Arabs west of the Jordan [River]. Whether in
war or under conditions of peace, emigration from the territories and economic
demographic freeze in them, are the guarantees for the coming change on both
banks of the river, and we ought to be active in order to accelerate this
process in the nearest future.
The autonomy plan ought also to be
rejected, as well as any compromise or division of the territories for ... it
is not possible to go on living in this country in the present situation
without separating the two nations, the Arabs to Jordan and the Jews to the
areas west of the river. [182]
Oded Yinon’s program
follows the time-honored imperial pattern of "divide and rule".
Lebanon, for example, was first targeted in 1919. The cover of war has been a
prerequisite for the consummation of these schemes, whether in the short or
long term. Neo-colonialism remains the preferred method of imperial rule
because occupations spread imperialism thin, as Che Guevara knew.
The Zionists, in particular, with
their relatively small population and their total dependence on U.S.
imperialism, can only enact their plan for Israeli dominion through
neo-colonial schemes in the Arab East, and these require the support of their
imperial master.
In this regard, Oded Yinon’s
blueprint is the application to the present and near future of the Zionist
design pursued by Herzl, Weizman, Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion, and, today, by Peres
and Shamir. Those who would select among them, offer Palestinians a Hobson’s
choice, for the political debate among the Zionist rulers centers on the means
and timing of a conquering design.
When, for example, Moshe Dayan took
Gaza in 1956, Ben Gurion became angry, informing Dayan, "I didn’t want
Gaza with people, but Gaza without people, the Galilee without people."
Moshe Dayan, himself, told Zionist youth at a meeting in the Golan Heights in
July 1968. "Our fathers had reached the frontiers recognized in the
partition plan; the Six-Day War generation has managed to reach Suez, Jordan,
and the Golan Heights. This is not the end. After the present cease-fire lines,
there will be new ones. They will extend beyond Jordan ... to Lebanon and ...
to central Syria as well." [182a] Neo-colonial rule, however, depends, as
Oded Yinon makes clear, upon the dialectical relation between military might
and hired hands.
Fragmenting the Arab states will
proceed under the cover of war - whether a blitzkrieg attack, use of a proxy
armed force or covert operations. The ultimate success requires local leaders
who can be bought or ensnared.
Zionists, therefore, have given us
repeatedly not only their Mein Kampf, but the evidence that
the preservation and extension of their rule depends on misleaders among the
victim peoples. The "divide-and-rule" schemes of Zionism and their
imperial patron are unending.
If the Palestinians and the Arab
masses are to withstand these plans for conquest, they will have to remove the
corrupt regimes which barter popular aspiration. They will need to forge a
revolutionary leadership which speaks openly about the role of these governments,
is vocal about Zionist plans, and which shows determination to carry the
struggle throughout the region.
The Four “No’s”
Yinon’s ideas are not
outlandish. They are advocated by Sharon and Begin’s Minister of Defense, Moshe
Arens, and also by the Labor Party.
Y’ben Poret, a ranking official in
the Israeli Ministry of Defense, was irritated in 1982 by pious criticisms of
the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza: "It is," he
declared, "time to rip away the veil of hypocrisy. In the present, as in
the past, there is no Zionism, no settlement of the land, no Jewish state,
without the removal of all the Arabs, without confiscation." [183] The
1984 political platform of the Labor Party was promoted in full-page ads in the
two leading Israeli dailies, Ma’ariv and Ha’aretz.
The ads highlighted the "Four
No’s":
·
No to a Palestinian state
·
No negotiations with the P.L.O.
·
No return to the 1967 borders
·
No removal of any settlements.
The ad advocated an
increase in the number of settlements on the West Bank and Gaza, their full
funding and protection.
In 1985, the President of Israel,
Chaim Herzog, a Labor Party leader, echoed the sentiments of Sharon and Shamir
emphasized by Oded Yinon.
We are certainly not
willing to make partners of the Palestinians in any way in a land that was holy
to our people for thousands of years. There can be no partner with the Jews of
this land. [184]
As with Camp David, even
a Bantustan on parts of the West Bank and Gaza would be but a prelude to the
next "dispersal". Forcing 2.5 million Palestinians into Jordan is,
another interim measure, for Israeli "lebensraum" [Hitler’s infamous
phrase meaning "living space"] will not be confined by the Jordan
River.
It should be clear, under
any future political situation or military constellation, that the solution of
the problem of the indigenous Arabs will come only when they recognize the
existence of Israel in secure borders up to the Jordan River and beyond it
[emphasis added], as our existential need in this difficult epoch, the nuclear
epoch which we shall soon enter. [185]
Palestinian Population Transfer
Yinon’s ideas were also
echoed in an important story carried by The Washington Post on
its front page on February 7, 1988, under the headline "Expelling
Palestinians: It Isn’t a New Idea and It Isn’t Just Kahane’s."
Two Israeli journalists, Yossi
Melman, diplomatic correspondent of the Israeli daily, Davar,
and Dan Raviv, London-based CBS News correspondent, disclosed that barely two
weeks after the end of the June 1967 war, secret Israeli cabinet meetings were
convened to discuss the "resettlement of Arabs". The information was
obtained from private diaries kept by Ya’acov Herzog, director general of the
Prime Minister’s office. The official transcript of the meeting remains secret.
According to the Post
article, Prime Minister Menachem Begin recommended the demolition of the
refugee camps and the transfer of the Palestinians to the Sinai. Finance
Minister Pinhas Sapir and Foreign Minister Abba Eban, both Labor Zionists,
disagreed. They called for the transfer of all the refugees "to
neighboring Arab countries, mainly Syria and Iraq".
The 1967 cabinet meeting did not
reach a decision.
“Sentiment seemed to favor Deputy
Prime Minister Yigal Allon’s proposal that the Palestinians ... should be
transported to the Sinai desert,” the Post article states.
Accordingly, the Prime Minister’s office, the Defense Ministry and the army
jointly set up a "secret unit charged with ‘encouraging’ the departure of
the Palestinians for foreign shores". The secret plan was revealed by
Ariel Sharon before a Tel Aviv audience in November 1987, when he disclosed the
existence of an "organization" which for years had transferred
Palestinians to other countries, including Paraguay, with whose government Israel
had made the necessary arrangements.
These "transfers" were
handled by the Israeli military governor’s office in Gaza. When one of the
transferees, Talal ibn-Dimassi, attacked the Israeli consulate in Asuncion,
Paraguay, killing the Consul’s secretary, complications ensued:
"The attack in Paraguay put an
abrupt end to the secret Israeli plan which the government had hoped would help
solve the problem of the Palestinians by exporting them," the Post
article states.
Over one million people were
contemplated for "transfer". Only 1,000 were successfully sent out.
Melman and Raviv emphasize that the
relocation of Palestinians is not new “as the 1967 cabinet discussions show”.
They state that a similar scheme would be attractive to a growing number of
Israelis ̶o;as they watch the recent uprising in the West Bank and Gaza”
An Option Long Considered
The authors acknowledge
that the removal of the Palestinians has been the central focus of Zionist
planning since the inception of the movement. They write:
Since the early days of
Zionism, resettlement has been an option for dealing with the problem posed by
the large Arab population in the historical land of Israel.
Melman and Raviv recount
a series of schemes which were designed to effect the removal of the Palestinian
people. The East bank of the Jordan River [the state of Jordan] was
contemplated, a scheme indicated in March 1988 in a full-page advertisement
republishing a column by George Will which equates Jordan with Palestine.
[185a]
Labor Zionists and Revisionists
were united on the necessity to transfer the Palestinians elsewhere. Vladimir
Jabotinsky spelled out the various efforts made since World War I in a letter
written in November 1939.
We should instruct
American Jewry to mobilize a half billion dollars in order that Iraq and Saudi
Arabia will absorb the Palestinian Arabs. There is no choice: The Arabs must
make room for the Jews in Eretz Israel. If it was possible to transfer the
Baltic peoples, it is also possible to move the Palestinian Arabs.
By 1947, Labor Zionists
and Revisionists joined together in the mass expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians.
In 1964, a young Israeli colonel named Ariel Sharon instructed his staff to
determine "the number of buses, vans and trucks required in case of war to
transport ... the Arabs out of northern Israel."
In 1967, Israeli military
commanders began the process.
One general sent
bulldozers to demolish three Arab villages near Latrun on the road to
Jerusalem, expelling their residents.
Such an expulsion order
was issued for the West Bank city of Qalqilya and then cancelled.
Since the Uprising began in
December 1987, Michael Dekel of the Likud has taken up the call "to
transfer the Arabs", and Gideon Patt, a government minister from the
Liberal Party, has declared that the Palestinians should be placed on trucks
and sent to the border.
Melman and Raviv conclude with the
following prognosis:
Kahane’s message - expel
the Palestinians or risk losing control of the land of Israel -remains a potent
one. And in the absence of a political solution to the Palestinian problem
[sic], Israel may be pushed toward desperate measures.
A Warning by Sharon
It is in this context
that Ariel Sharon’s declaration of March 24, 1988, is to be assessed. Sharon
stated that if the Palestinian uprising continued, Israel would have to make
war on its Arab neighbors. The war, he stated, would provide "the
circumstances" for the removal of the entire Palestinian population from
inside Israel and from the West Bank and Gaza.
That these are not idle remarks or
restricted to Sharon became clear when Yossi Ben Aharon, director general of
the office of the Prime Minister, declared in Los Angeles:
Israel has acquired a
reputation of not waiting until a potential danger becomes actual.
Ben Aharon was referring
to the acquisition by Saudi Arabia of silkworm missiles from China intended to
menace Iran. The Israeli declaration was taken very seriously by the Saudis,
President Mubarak of Egypt and the Reagan administration, inducing a
"flurry of diplomatic activity".
The March 23, 1988, New
York Times reports:
The Reagan administration
has expressed its concern that Israel not conduct any pre-emptive attack on
Chinese-built missiles purchased recently by Saudi Arabia ... Israel has not
given a definitive reply to the Administration’s appeals to refrain from
attacking the Saudi missiles. The missiles ... were discussed during Mr.
Shamir’s visit to Washington last week.
Within two days of Ben
Aharon’s statement, Hosni Mubarak warned Israel that Egypt "would react to
an Israeli attack on Saudi Arabia’s new medium-range missile sites as ’firmly
and decisively’ as if it were an attack on Egypt itself". [185b]
This statement was followed by
Mubarak with a second declaration in what was described as "a deepening
crisis".
Mubarak told reporters
that he took a ’grave’ view of reports that Israel was considering a
pre-emptive air strike to destroy the missiles.... ’This is a grave, grave
matter. An Israeli attack ... would blow up the entire peace process. I warn
against any attack on Saudi Arabia which is a sisterly and friendly country.
[l85b]
These public responses by
President Mubarak indicate that the possibility of an Israeli adventure,
intended to provide cover for expulsion of the Palestinians and to fragment
Saudi Arabia, the paymaster of the Arab regimes, is not an idle one.
The timing of The
Washington Post story of February 7, I 988, may be more than
fortuitous. The Israeli authorities have no answer to the uprising of the
Palestinian people other than intensified repression.
Israel and U.S. Power
If the Palestinian people
face the destruction of their organized existence by Israel, one fact must be
stressed: The Zionist state is nothing but the extension of the power of the
United States in the region.
Israeli extermination plans,
occupations and expansion are on behalf of the principal imperialist power in
the world.
Whatever may be the tactical
divergences which emerge from time to time between Israel and the United
States, there is no Zionist campaign that can sustain itself without the
backing of its principal sponsor. The U.S. government between 1949 and 1983,
provided $92.2 billion in military aid, economic aid, loans, special grants and
tax deductible "bonds and gifts". [186] As Joseph C. Harsh, put it in
the August 5, 1982, issue of The Christian Science Monitor.
Few countries in history
have been as dependent on another as Israel is on the United States. Israel’s
major weapons are from the United States - either as gifts or on long-term,
low-interest loans, which few seriously expect to be repaid.
Israel’s survival is underwritten
and subsidized from Washington. Without American arms, Israel would lose the
quantitative and qualitative advantage which President Reagan has promised to
maintain for them. Without the economic subsidy, Israel’s credit would vanish
and its economy would collapse.
In other words, Israel can only do
what Washington allows it to do. It dare not conduct a single military
operation without the tacit consent of Washington. When it does undertake a
military offensive, the world assumes correctly that it has Washington’s tacit
consent.
The Israeli state is not
coextensive with the Jews as a people. Zionism, historically, has been a
minority ideology among Jews. A state is but an apparatus which enforces
specific economic and social relations. It is a structure of power and its
purpose is, however guised, to coerce and to impose obedience.
If, for example, the apartheid
state of South Africa had three-fifths less territory or two-thirds less people
under its control, it would not be a whit less unjust. An oppressive state is
unacceptable whether it presides over a postage stamp or a continent. The
Namphy regime in Haiti is no less repugnant because of the relatively small
size of that country or of the population over which it rules.
Our attitude toward a state which
exploits and demeans its subjects is not conditioned by the extent of its
sovereign reach. We know this to be true for Stroessner’s Paraguay or Zhivkov’s
Bulgaria. It is no less true of the Zionist state of Israel.
Even if the apartheid Israeli state
were anchored on a ship off of Haifa, it would be an outrage. Like the South
African state, Pinochet’s Chile or the state in America (run by 2% of the
population who control 90% of the national wealth), we owe it no allegiance.
Blood, Sweat and Tears
Nearly fifty years ago,
an orator responded not to the occupation of his country or the liquidation of
three-fourths of its towns and villages. He was not reacting to massacre, mass
imprisonment, detention camps and torture. He did not decry the theft of the
land and property of an entire people or their overnight transformation into
pauperized refugees existing in tent camps, hunted and persecuted wherever they
fled. He did not denounce a forty-year ordeal punctuated by unrelenting
bombing, invasion and yet further dispersal. He responded to but a few weeks of
sporadic bombing as he declaimed, memorably.
I have nothing to offer
you but blood, tears, and sweat. You ask, “What is our policy?” I say it is to
wage war, by sea, land and air. With all our might and with all the strength
that God can give us to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed
in the dark, lamentable catalog of human crime. That is our policy.
You ask, “What is our aim?” I
answer in one word - victory. Victory at all costs. Victory in spite of all
terror. Victory however long and hard the road may be. For without victory for
us, there is no survival, let that be realized, no survival. I feel sure that
our cause will not be subject to failure and I feel entitled to claim the aid
of all.
And a week later, he
declared:
We shall defend our
island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight
on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields. We shall fight in the
streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender. And even if,
which I do not for a moment believe, this island were subjugated and starving,
we shall carry on the struggle.
What is it that makes it
permissible for the head of the Raj, the Imperial Raj, Winston Churchill, to
utter these sentiments - but renders them illicit for the Palestinian people?
Nothing, but that endemic racism which colors consciousness in our society.
Winston Churchill was a belligerent
spokesperson of British imperialism, notably in Palestine and the Arab world.
If Churchill can be allowed, demagogically, to sound a call to resist
aggression and attack, how much more are the Palestinian people entitled to
fight back - to resist occupation, to battle for their survival and social
justice.
Notes
157. Israel Shahak,
trans. & ed., The Zionist Plan For the Middle East
(Belmont, Mass.: A.A.U.G., 1982).
158. Ibid.,
p.5.
159. Ibid.
160. Ibid.,
p.9.
161. Ibid.
162. Ibid.,
p.5.
163. Ibid.,
p.4.
164. Ibid.,
p.5.
165. Ibid.,
p.9.
166. Ibid.
167. Ibid.,
p.4.
168. Ibid.
169. Ibid.,
p.9.
170. Ibid.,
p.5.
171. Ibid.,
p.4.
172. Ibid.,
p.8.
173. Ibid.
174. Ibid.
175. Ibid.,
p.4.
176. Ibid.,
p.4 & p.9.
177. Ibid.,
p.5.
178. Ibid.,
p.10.
179. Ibid.
180. Ibid.,
pp.10-11.
181. Ibid.,
pp.9-10.
182. Ibid.,
p.10.
182a. London Sunday
Times, June 25, 1969.
183. Israeli
Mirror, London.
184. Yosi Berlin, Meichuro
Shel Ichud, 1985, p.14.
185. Shahak, The
Zionist Plan.
185a. New York
Times, March 27, 1988.
185b. The Washington
Post, February 7, 1988.
185c. Ibid.
185d. Ibid.
185e. Ibid.
185f. New York
Times, March 23, 1988.
185g. Los
Angeles Times, March 25, 1988.
185h. Ibid.
186. For a full
discussion of the financial relationship between the United States and Israel
see Mohammed El Khawas & Samir Abed Rabbo, American Aid to Israel:
Nature & Impact (Brattleboro, Vt.: Amana Books, 1984).
|
Chapter 13
|
There are over five
million settlers of European origin in South Africa. The Afrikaaner population
and those of British descent have lived in South Africa for many generations.
Yet very few people, let alone those purporting to be advocates of
self-determination for Blacks in South Africa, propose two states - a European
white state with guaranteed security alongside a demilitarized African state.
In fact, it is precisely the
existence of such an arrangement in the form of the Bantustans in South Africa
which has rendered utterly indefensible this cover for the preservation of
racist rule.
Similarly, in colonial Algeria and
in Northern and Southern Rhodesia, the large European settler populations -
many of them descendants of generations of settlers - were not accorded a
separate status, let alone a settler state on usurped land of the oppressed.
On the contrary, in South Africa -
as in Algeria, Zambia or Zimbabwe - it is understood that self-determination of
a colonized people cannot be equated with a settler state. It is sleight of
hand to suggest that, having dispossessed the population by force, the settlers
now have an equivalent claim to the conquered territory.
If this is universally understood
elsewhere, why this indecent exceptionalism when it comes to Israel?
Those who would foist upon the
Palestinian people the demand that they recognize an apartheid Israeli state
know full well that the national rights of a colonized people do not extend to
their colonizers.
In Israel, no less than in South
Africa, minimum justice requires dismantling the apartheid state and replacing
it with a democratic secular Palestine, where citizenship and rights are not
determined by ethnic criteria.
In reality, the supposed supporters
of Palestinian human rights who urge acceptance and recognition of the Israeli
state are, however disguised, acting as lawyers for the colonial state in
Palestine. Their advocacy carries the pseudo-left cover of self-determination
for "both" peoples, but this specious employment of the principle of
self-determination translates into a covert call for amnesty for Israel.
Many so-called realists argue that
Palestinian acknowledgment of the "right" of apartheid Israel to
exist will hasten the day when a Palestinian state would be permitted by the
Zionists to come into being. But this rationalization does not carry much
conviction. The Zionists do not depend upon verbal acceptance for their state,
but upon armed force.
For Palestinians to accept,
recognize and thereby legitimize the murderous conquest of their land would
merely permit the Zionists to contend that forty years of intransigence on the
part of the oppressed are responsible for their suffering. It would sanction
the claim that Israel was a legitimate construct from the start.
Rather than acting as a bridge
toward the establishment of a unitary Palestine, as some in the P.L.O. leadership
contend today, the establishment of a "mini-state" on the West Bank -
and the recognition of the Zionist state, which is a pre-condition for its
creation - would represent a giant obstacle in its path.
Recognition of the Israeli state
would invalidate retroactively the right of resistance of the oppressed and
would provide cover for the Zionist demand that only Palestinians who had
capitulated and sanctioned Israel in the past, accepting its legitimacy, have
the right to negotiate with Israel. When you dance with the Devil, your speech
reveals his breath.
What of the Palestinians who live
inside the 1967 borders, and what of the Jews themselves? Would apartheid end
in South Africa, or the state be transformed by recognizing its right to exist?
Would we serve the interests of the people of Paraguay or Chile by accepting
the claims to legitimacy of Stroessner or Pinochet, or by providing sanction
for the states they have constructed?
International Peace Conference
Despite the obvious
answers to all these questions, there are, nonetheless, an increasing number of
people who, today, are actively pushing for an international peace conference
on the Middle East with the goal of establishing a Palestinian
"mini-state" alongside the Israeli state.
On January 10, 1988, for example, Al-Fajr,
a Jerusalem Palestinian weekly, published a statement signed by prominent Jews
and Arabs which called for "a peaceful resolution of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict" that would "ensure both Israeli and
Palestinian national rights".
In an interview with the Reuters
press service on January 18, Hanna Siniora, editor of Al Fajr,
specified how Israeli and Palestinian "national rights" might be
ensured at such an international peace conference. Siniora called for "an
association among Israel, Jordan, and a Palestinian state like that of the
Benelux countries – with a demilitarized West Bank as the Luxemburg".
"Palestinians, including
Arafat, would accept autonomy as an interim step toward independence,"
Siniora said. "Autonomy is a step that would lead eventually to
negotiations between the state of Israel and the P.L.O., ending in a
Palestinian state emerging as a result of those negotiations."
Siniora met with Secretary of State
George Shultz in Washington on January 28 to discuss this proposal. Siniora’s
meeting occurred only days after P.L.O. Chairman Yasir Arafat had announced
that he was interested in making a deal with Israel and the United States. A
dispatch from Associated Press on January 17 explained Arafat’s overtures: "Arafat
says that if those countries [Israel and the United States] agree to an
international conference on Middle East peace, he will recognize Israel’s right
to exist. The White House says this could be an encouraging sign ..."
A "Rump" Palestinian
State
George Ball, who served
as Under Secretary of State under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations,
spelled out how the United States and Israel should approach an international
peace conference. Ball’s article, which is titled Peace for Israel hinges
on a state for Palestinians, states the following:
Israel’s security worries
could be largely met by writing stringent, enforceable safeguards into a formal
treaty, denying the new [Palestinian] state any armed force of its own and
limiting the numbers and kinds of weapons available to its police.
As a further safeguard, the
settlement could require installation of surveillance posts larger and more
numerous and effective than those now functioning in the Sinai under Israel’s
peace agreement with Egypt. [186a]
Ball explains that the
establishment of what he openly admits would be a "rump Palestinian state
in the West Bank" is a matter of urgency. "If the United States does
not seriously seek to bring the parties together," Ball warns, "the
... warfare in the Holyland will spread and intensify. Sooner or later, the
neighboring Arab states - even Egypt - will be dragged into the
maelstrom."
The "maelstrom" that this
imperialist spokesperson so strongly fears is the emancipation of the Arab
masses of the region from the Israeli colonial-settler state; from the feudal
sheiks of the Gulf and Arabian peninsula; and from the Egyptian regime, which
has reduced the workers and peasants of Egypt to a level of poverty unknown
even under King Farouk.
An international conference designed
to legitimize the security interests of apartheid Israel in exchange for a
Palestinian "Bantustan" can never be viable except if a Palestinian
leadership were to provide this plan with protective coloration. Such an
outcome will merely hand to the P.L.O. the unenviable task of policing the
Palestinian people and of converting self-determination into another sad
replica of the country-selling regimes which plague the Arab masses - from
Jordan to Syria and from Egypt to the Gulf.
It was but a few years ago that no
Palestinian nationalist would dare associate him or herself with so blatant an
effort to betray the long years of struggle for Palestinian self-determination
and emancipation, let alone translate the Palestinian cause into a plea for a
role in preserving the status quo in the region - with its grinding poverty and
relentless exploitation and subordination to U.S. imperialist control.
Those who argue that it is
practical to propose a two-state solution because this plan is more likely to
be accepted are guilty, decency aside, of what C. Wright Mills called
"crackpot realism".
There has never been any component
of the Zionist movement - from its nominal "right" to its
self-designated "left" - which has accepted Palestinian statehood in
any form compatible with self-determination.
A revealing example of the dangers
for the Palestinian revolution of a "mini-state" proposal comes from
the pen of Jerome M. Segal, a research scholar at the University of Maryland
and a founder of the Jewish Committee for Israeli-Palestinian Peace.
Segal, who represents the
"left" wing of the Zionist movement, writes the following in a
February 16, 1988, Los Angeles Times article titled, A
Palestinian state serves interests of Israelis, too:
Ironically, of all the
alternatives an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza is the
one solution that best serves Israeli security ...
A Palestinian state would be the
fullest possible satisfaction of the demands of Palestinian nationalism ... It
would win the support of the P.L.O. and is the only likely basis on which the
P.L.O. would formally abandon the right to return to the land and villages lost
in 1948. As the recognized embodiment of the Palestinian cause, only the P.L.O.
can compromise in the name of the Palestinians ...
A Palestinian state would be a
demilitarized mini-state. It would be completely enclosed by Israel on one side
and Jordan on the other. No military supplies or forces could reach it without
passing through Israel or Jordan.
The foreign policy of such a
mini-state would be dominated by its links to the Israeli economy and by its
national-security realities. In the event of a war, its very existence would be
in jeopardy ... Israel would not be seriously threatened if hostilities broke
out ...
For Israel, a Palestinian state is
not a charming prospect. It is simply better than the alternatives.
Segal’s call for what
amounts to a "rump Palestinian state in the West Bank" is a mockery
of Palestinian self-determination.
Indeed, far from being willing to
relinquish control of the West Bank and Gaza, the Zionists - as Ben Gurion,
Dayan and Oded Yinon make clear - are too busy plotting the conquest of Kuwait.
The day that African or Palestinian
rights are secured with the sanction of apartheid South Africa or by Zionist
Israel under U.S. control will be the day we learn that Caligula was a disciple
of Jesus, Hitler embraced Marx, and Bull Conner, eyes rolled to Heaven,
chanted, "We shall overcome".
Meanwhile, the tortured, the dying,
the oppressed cannot afford the fantasies of their "practical"
reformist friends; the price of such illusions is paid in blood. The "rump
Palestinian state" of George Ball’s vision will be operated for the
privileged on the backs of the Palestinian poor. Those Palestinian leaders who
embrace this concocted entity - modelled on the inspiring examples of the
dependent sheikdoms of the Gulf and the Bantustans of South Africa - will
become the Chiang Kai-sheks, Tshombes, and King Husseins of suffering
Palestine. The rights of the Palestinian people can never be advanced in this
way.
For a Democratic Secular Palestine
In 1968, twenty years
after the colonial-settler state of Israel was established, the Palestinian
resistance movement formulated its demand for self-determination in the call
for the replacement of the Israeli state with an independent, unitary
Palestine.
The majority wing of the Palestine
Liberation Organization, Fatah, set forth the program for the
establishment of a "democratic, secular Palestine". This slogan
called for the dismantling of the Zionist Israeli state and the establishment
of a new state in Palestine in which Jews, Christians, and Arabs would live as
equals without discrimination.
What was notable about this brave
proposal was that (1) it categorically rejected any accommodation with or
recognition of the Zionist state; and (2) it rejected the proposal for a
Palestinian "mini-state" on the West Bank and Gaza.
P.L.O. Chairman Yasir Arafat
described his proposal as follows in a remarkable biography written by
journalist Alan Hart:
We were saying “no” to
the Zionist state, but we were saying “yes” to the Jewish people of Palestine.
To them we were saying, “You are welcome to live in our land, but on one
condition - You must be prepared to live among us as equals, not as
dominators.”
I myself have always said that
there is only one guarantee for the safety and security of the Jewish people in
Palestine and that is the friendship of the Arabs among whom they live. [187]
A document submitted by
Arafat’s Fatah organization to the Second World Congress on Palestine in
September 1970 spells out the profile of a democratic and secular Palestine
even more clearly. The 1970 Fatah document states:
Pre-1948 Palestine - as
defined during the British mandate - is the territory to be liberated ... It
should be quite obvious at this stage that the new Palestine discussed here is
not the occupied West Bank or the Gaza Strip or both. These are areas occupied
by the Israelis since June 1967. The homeland of the Palestinians usurped and
colonized in 1948 is no less dear or important than the part occupied in 1967.
Besides, the very existence of the
racist oppressor state of Israel, based on the expulsion and forced exile of
part of its citizens, even from one tiny village, is unacceptable to the
revolution. Any arrangement accommodating the aggressor settler state is
unacceptable and temporary ...
All the Jews, Moslems, and
Christians living in Palestine or forcibly exiled from it will have the right
to Palestinian citizenship ... This means that all Jewish Palestinians - at the
present Israelis - have the same rights provided, of course, that they reject
Zionist racist chauvinism and fully agree to live as Palestinians in the new
Palestine ... It is the belief of the revolution that the majority of the
present Israeli Jews will change their attitudes and will subscribe to the new
Palestine, especially after the oligarchic state machinery, economy, and
military establishment are destroyed. [188]
Role of Soviet Bureaucracy
The Soviet bureaucracy
reacted sharply to Fatah’s attempt to transform the P.L.O. into a revolutionary
movement with a program and strategy aimed at mobilizing the masses and winning
them for a revolutionary transformation of a settler regime.
According to Alan Hart, whose
biography of Arafat was "written in cooperation with Yasir Arafat and the
top leadership of the P.L.O., "the Soviet leaders told Arafat that they
were fully committed to the existence of the state of Israel and that they had
not the slightest intention of supporting or encouraging Palestinian militance
or military capacity." [189]
Two of Fatah’s principal leaders,
Khalid al-Hassan and Khalil al Wazir (Abu Jihad), went to Moscow to explain
Fatah’s program. They left Moscow, to cite Khalid al-Hassan, "With the
clear impression that the Palestinians would not receive Soviet support for
their cause until they were ready to accept Israel’s existence inside the
borders as they were on the eve of the [June 1967] Six Day War." [190]
"Because we were ourselves
beginning to be educated about the reality of international politics,"
reflects Hani al-Hassan, Khalid’s brother, "we realized that we couldn’t
expect to advance our cause without the support of at least one of two
superpowers. We had knocked on the door of the United States and its Western
allies and we had received no answer, so we wanted to try with the Soviets. We
had no choice." [191]
Retreat to "Mini-State"
Position
Fatah’s leaders soon lost
all confidence in the possibility of sustaining the political program which
they had once proclaimed - that of a democratic and secular Palestine for which
they had planned to struggle by mobilizing the Palestinian and Jewish masses.
In February 1974, a P.L.O. working
paper was formulated which retreated from this program. The paper proposed
"To establish a national authority on any lands that can be wrested from
Zionist occupation". [192]
Arafat and the majority of his
Fatah colleagues were now committed to working for a negotiated
"settlement" which required the Palestinian people to accept the loss
"for all time" of 70% of their original homeland in exchange for a
"mini-state" on the West Bank and Gaza.
Arafat openly acknowledged that the
entire Palestinian people were opposed to this policy. Alan Hart writes:
Arafat and most of his
senior colleagues in the leadership knew they needed time to sell it to the
rank and file of the liberation movement. If, in 1974, Arafat and his
colleagues had openly admitted the true extent of the compromise they were
prepared to make, they would have been repudiated and rejected by an easy
majority of the Palestinians. [193] [emphasis added]
Arafat was now embarked
upon a course in which he could not tell the truth to his own people about the
political line which he and his colleagues had taken. The words are those of
Yasir Arafat:
Our tragedy at the time
was that the world refused to understand there were two aspects, two sides, to
the question of what was possible. First, there was the question of what it was
possible for the Palestinians to achieve in practical terms - given the fact
that the two [emphasis added] superpowers were committed to Israel’s
existence ...
But there was also the question of
what it was possible for the Palestinian leadership to persuade its people to
accept. When a people is claiming the return of 100% of its land, it’s not so
easy for leadership to say, “No, you can take only 30%.” [194]
The disparity between the
public posture and the private practice became the touchstone of P.L.O.
political practice in this period, with considerable confusion and
demoralization among the masses arising from it. Arafat is frank about this:
You say to me and you are
right, that our public position on the compromise we were prepared to make was
ambiguous for many years while we were educating our people about the need for
compromise. But I must also tell you that our real position was always known to
the governments of the world, including the government of Israel.
How? From 1974, even from the end
of 1973, certain of our people were officially authorized to maintain secret
contacts with Israelis and with important people in the West. Their
responsibility was to say in secret what at the time we could not say in
public. [195] [emphasis added]
This clandestine policy
was carried out for five years, from 1974 to 1979, with neither awareness nor
endorsement by the elected members of the Palestine National Council. It
required diplomatic maneuvering and lobbying.
It also required, to quote Alan
Hart, "out-maneuvering and outwitting those [in the P.L.O. ‘left’] who
were opposed to the ‘ministate’." Hart explains:
If he had been put to the
test of actual negotiations by Israel between 1974 and 1979 ... Arafat could
not have delivered peace on the basis of the “mini-state” formula without
splitting the P.L.O. [196]
But inducing the
"left" to acquiesce proved to be like pushing on an open door. And by
the time of the 1979 Palestine National Congress, George Habash and the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) had endorsed the
"mini-state" plan. Indeed, by 1979, all components of the P.L.O. had
adopted the call for a "mini-state" on the West Bank and Gaza. From
1974 on, all wings of the P.L.O. had demonstrated they were incapable of
formulating an independent, revolutionary strategy for the Palestinian
struggle.
Addressing the Jewish Working
Class
As the 1970 Fatah
document correctly noted, the future of the struggle of the Palestinian people
is tied up with a political strategy which addresses itself to Israeli Jews and
which calls upon them to join with the Palestinians in a struggle for a
democratic and secular Palestine.
Indeed, within the Zionist state,
68% of the settler population is made up of Oriental (mainly Sephardic) Jews.
They come from countries which are impoverished, many of them often with
retrograde regimes.
The great mass of Oriental Jews are
poor. So the means which are used to keep them down economically and
politically, are the same used in any ghetto, barrio or working-class
neighborhood across the United States or anywhere else.
The Oriental Jews do have
the same rights under Israeli law - in formal terms. Here’s the problem: In
Israel, after the 9th grade, there are special charges which make a high-school
education very costly. This means, in practice, that only a tiny percentage of
Oriental Jews go on to obtain a higher education. Oriental Jews comprise 10% of
university students and 3% of university graduates. This follows from economic
exploitation.
Their political representation does
not reflect their proportion of the population. Oriental Jews hold only one
sixth of the seats in the Knesset [Israel’s Parliament]. Elie Eliachar, a
prominent leader of the Oriental community and a former member of the Knesset,
explained that even this representation is nominal. In effect, the Oriental
deputies represent "all-Ashkenazi political parties to which they owe sole
allegiance rather than the Sephardi-Oriental community". "This,"
he writes, "makes Israeli democracy a mere caricature."[197]
There should, however, be no
misunderstanding. The Oriental Jews are very often Zionist. It would be
misleading to talk about them without making it clear that the Israelis, like
all imperialist and colonial powers, have used the divide-and-rule approach in
handling them.
The Oriental Jews have a very
precarious socio-economic status in Israel. They are but slightly better off
than the Palestinians themselves. A Jew from Iraq, Morocco, or Yemen, moreover,
is an Arab of Jewish religious origins. In mores, manner, custom, and
appearance, they are as their Moslem and Christian brothers and sisters. They
also suffer discrimination. The Zionists continually attempt to instil racist
hatred in the Oriental Jews for the Palestinian masses.
When young Oriental Jews are sent
to fight in Lebanon or to the West Bank and Gaza, their eyes are opened to
Israel’s war policies. They come back to the same miserable economic and social
position they endured before they left. This was what had led in years past to
the development of a Black Panther movement in the Sephardic slums and to the
beginnings of a radicalization among the Sephardim. There is a rage barely
beneath the surface, and one of these days the explosion will happen within the
Sephardic community. This is inevitable.
When the Palestinian people begin
to mobilize it cannot but speak to the condition of the Jewish working class.
It behooves a Palestinian revolutionary leadership to address the Jews with a
vision of a democratic-secular Palestine. In time, the Jewish workers will respond
to Palestinian mobilization. The first step is to think, "If they can do
it, so can we." The second is to look around for allies. That is the road
to an anti-Zionist revolutionary movement.
Crisis of Revolutionary Leadership
Despite the tremendous
revolutionary opportunities over the past several years, the leadership of the
P.L.O. has shown itself unable to develop a strategy for the mobilization in
Palestine of the Palestinian and Jewish masses against the Zionist state.
Neither the "moderate" leadership
of Yasir Arafat, the "progressive" leadership of the Popular and
Democratic Fronts, nor the "disident" Fatah rebels have formulated a
strategy for the Palestinian people independent of the rotten capitalist
regimes of the region.
The P.L.O. leaders at one moment
curry favor with imperialism and its agents, the country-selling regimes of the
Arab East, and at another indulge in random acts of force. Each course is
designed, misguidedly, to induce imperialism to endorse the establishment of a
Palestinian "mini-state".
But these regimes - from Syria to
Jordan to Egypt - regard the Palestinian revolution as a clear and present
danger. They understand that the extraordinary struggle of the Palestinian
nation - even under the nationalist P.L.O. leadership - is a reminder to their
own suffering people of what is to be done and who is in the way.
A revolutionary Palestinian
leadership should struggle, as many do, for the dismantlement of the Israeli
state.
The assassination of Khalil
al-Wazir (Abu Jihad) on April 17, 1988, was a clear message to the Fatah wing
of the P.L.O. and to the Arab governments. It is virtually impossible, now, for
this leadership to project plausibly a "settlement" with Israel.
Their expectations of negotiations which could result in some limited form of
Palestinian self-determination have been shown to be illusory. The Israeli
intent was to prompt an armed response from within the uprising; indeed, a
staged provocation by Israeli intelligence in the name of the Intifadeh is not
precluded. For the basic Zionist agenda is to depopulate Palestine, and the
cover of war is needed to effect yet again a mass expulsion of Palestinians.
The Israeli press unanimously
ascribed the murder operation to Israeli Navy commando units and the Mossad, an
assault involving thirty people. Davar reported on April 18
that the decision to assassinate Abu Jihad was approved at the cabinet level
while Secretary of State George Shultz was in Jerusalem and proceeded after
receiving a green light from the United States.
The Davar
editorial confirms that the assassination is to be "credited to ministers
Shamir, Rabin and Peres". [198] Davar reported that Prime
Minister Yitzhak Shamir "leapt with joy" upon hearing the news and
sent congratulatory telegrams to each of the perpetrators. Shamir had carried
out such murders of his own in the past, notably of United Nations mediator
Count Folke Bernadotte on September 17, 1948. Such an operation, with all its
implications, could not occur without U.S. sanction. It reveals the real nature
of the Shultz "peace" proposals. They are a cover for preparations to
crush the uprising and for a new war.
The tragic death of Abu Jihad is
particularly instructive in its timing. The Mossad has had the ability to
murder major figures, such as Abu Jihad, in the past. His killing is the
equivalent of a declaration of war. It underlines, once again, the necessity
for a new strategy on the part of a revolutionary Palestinian leadership, one
based on a political program directed to the Palestinian and Jewish masses for
the replacement of the Zionist state.
The Way Forward
The Palestinian masses
are in motion. The extraordinary will to struggle on the part of the entire
population has shown that there is no going back. The Intifadeh needs to focus
on specific features of oppression and to challenge them by reclaiming the
land, planting forbidden crops, sinking wells and withholding labor in the
course of demanding unconditional Israeli withdrawal.
A revolutionary Palestinian
leadership will need to devise a program for inside the Green Line which
addresses the Jews within Israel as well as the Moslems and Christians. In
short, what is necessary is a blueprint for a post-Zionist society which
inspires people and associates the inequities of their lives with the Zionist
state.
As the Zionist state is at once a
species of capitalist class rule and an extension of U.S. imperial power in the
region, the struggle against Zionism becomes, programmatically, a struggle for
a socialist Palestine and, as the dawn follows the long night, a struggle for a
socialist Arab East - from the Mediterranean to the Gulf.
A P.L.O. faithful to its promise of
a democratic-secular Palestine would include in its leadership those
anti-Zionist Jews who have fought the colonial-settler state. In this way, the
Jewish masses themselves would be able to see who really speaks for them, and
who offers them a way out of perpetual war, insecurity, and deprivation.
A clear call for a democratic and
secular Palestine is essential to uniting mass social forces capable of
dismantling the Zionist state and replacing it with a humane society dedicated
to the ending of class and national oppression.
The Palestinian revolutionary
movement can only advance by hammering out a new strategy based on combining
the Palestinian national struggle with the struggle of the workers and peasants
of the whole Middle East for liberation from both capitalist and imperialist
domination - for a socialist Middle East.
There is no short cut to
liberation, as the century-old ordeal of the Palestinian people has shown. The
road to victory will only be shortened when a leadership arises which knows its
direction and proposes the path in a language which enlists the people,
mobilizes them in their own behalf, and exposes fearlessly the false leaders
dangerously in the way.
The Palestinian answer to the
Zionist and imperialist schemes can be found in the stone-throwing children of
Jabaliya, the Beach Camp, Balata and Dheisheh. For this, as Jabotinsky was
obliged by them to acknowledge, is a people, a living people - not a rabble,
but a conscious people fighting with stones and sling shots against the fourth
largest military power in the world.
We owe them, at the very least,
fidelity to their revolutionary struggle, which can never be complete until it
extends from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, from the Brook of Egypt to
the Euphrates - and, as their Zionist oppressors forever proclaim, "and
beyond".
Notes
186a. Los
Angeles Times, January 17, 1988.
187. Cited in Alan Hart,
Arafat: Terrorist or Peacemaker (Sidgwick and Jackson, revised
edition), p.275.
188. Cited in Documents
of the Palestinian Resistance Movement (New York: Merit pamphlet,
Pathfinder Press, 1971 ). The full statement by Fatah was also printed in the
October 16, 1970, issue of The Militant newspaper.
189. Hart, p.279.
190. Ibid.,
p.277.
191. Ibid.,
p.278.
192. Ibid.,
p.379.
193. Ibid.,
p.379.
194. Ibid.,
p.379.
195. Ibid.,
p.379.
196. Ibid.,
p.379.
197. Naseer H. Aruri, The
Oriental Jews of Israel, Zionism and Racism, p.113.
198. New York
Times, April 18, 1988.
The Zionist Vision of Eretz
Israel
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The
Israel of Theodore Herzl (1904) and Rabbi Fischmann (1947)
In his Complete Diaries, Vol.II, Page 711, Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, says that the area of the Jewish state stretches: “From the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates”.
Rabbi Fischmann, member
of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, declared in his testimony to the U.N.
Special Committee of Enquiry on July 9, 1947:
The Promised Land extends from the
River of Egypt to the Euphrates. It includes parts of Syria and Lebanon.
Bibliographic
Note
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|
The Hidden History of Zionism
By Ralph Schoenman
Copyright (c) 1988 by Ralph Schoenman
All Rights Reserved
Library
of Congress Catalog Card Number: 88-50585
ISBN:
0-929675-00-2 (Hardcover)
ISBN: 0-929675-01-0 (Paperback)
Manufactured
in the United States
First Edition, 1988
Veritas Press
PO BOX 6090
Vallejo CA 94591
e-mail:veritas9@pacbell.net
Cover
design by Mya Shone
Cover photograph by Donald McCullin
(As printed in The Palestinians by Jonathan Dimbleby, Quartet
Books, Ltd.)
Copies of the printed edition of The Hidden History of Zionism, in hardcover or paperback
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in REDS – Die Roten by permission of the
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