Author: Paolo Barnard
Adaptation-translation: Fausto Molinari
Note about the author:
Paolo Barnard is an Italian journalist who has worked for important national newspapers, periodicals, national TV and cultural magazines. He has dealt mainly with foreign policy, has always worked as a free lancer, never employed and never under contract, moreover he has never been affiliated with any political party or lobby.
He has written books on International Terrorism, Palestine and Israel and humanisation of medical care and has organised many conferences around Italy to present his investigative reports. Beside his job as journalist he has always been active as voluntary on different fields like: Human Rights, social exclusion, world poverty, aid to terminal ills and civic commitment.
Contents
1 The false facts about the conflict
2 “Terra Nullius” principle
3 A pacific cohabitation of Arabs and Jews
4 The choice of Palestine as home for the Jews
5 The British treason
6 The first conflicts and the attempt to reach an agreement
7 “Neo-Nazi” massacres accomplished by Israel
8 The falsehoods about 1948 war
9 The 1967 war, more falsehoods
10 Conclusion
11 Important references for further research on Palestine and Israel
The false facts about the conflict
To fully understand the Palestinian-Israeli “conflict” is paradoxically useless reading the newspapers or watching the news on TV rather than going through certain events that happened so far back in time that none would ever consider as influential.
The critical point around the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, or the Palestinian tragedy, is the way the events have being told the rest of the world.
I am deeply certain that if ever the real history of this tragedy would had ever been told the public opinion, the conflict had probably ended years ago. I am assessing this because humanity has the ability to progress through history and to stop cruelties in some way or another as long as it is fully aware of the cruelty being in place and of the real situation behind it.
The history that has been told so far about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is more or less the following (in few sentences): there is a population (Israel) which has been subject to one of the worst cruelty of human history, the holocaust; this population is searching its own national identity (territory and safety) in a land called Palestine where it has spiritual and cultural connections.
This land is apparently already inhabited by an Arabic population probably underdeveloped, hostile, barbaric and ignorant which is going to continue the persecution of the Israeli population forever and ever. This is what the rest of the world knows about Israel and Palestine: they know that Israel makes wars, that it kills civilians, but (after all) it is only defending itself from a new elimination attempt. As long as the western world has this view about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict a definitive peaceful solution will never be put in place.
The truth about the situation (and the history) of that area must be revealed and told the rest of the world, only by then the public opinion will react!
Now, in order to understand what the world knows about Palestinian-Israeli conflict it is worth to use a metaphoric example recalling the French revolution. Everyone knows what the French revolution is, what happened at the time and why, but let’s try to imagine a scenario where the Revolution is taught in schools, universities, households, public debates, books and throughout cultures only by showing images of furious men dragging a group of other men through an angry crowd that splits, insults and throws stuff to them. Those men are then placed on a scaffold and executed by guillotine.
Or yet another scene where a group of apparently poor and shabby men equipped with axes and forks crushes into a noble villa raping the women, silting the children, killing the men and setting everything to fire.
These events did indeed happen during the French revolution but, if the French revolution would be told as we did above, today the world would think of it as a coup d’etat made by a group of terrorists that has killed, decapitated and burned lots of people whose only fault was to be noble and rich but have never done anything wrong after all. The French revolution would then be remembered as a barbaric event worth to be forgotten through history.
Hard to believe, but this is exactly what has happened with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and how it has been told the world so far. Instead of giving a full perspective of the events they only showed us scenes depicting the PLO (1) making a carnage at the airport, Mahmoud Abbas’s (also known as Abu Mazen) warriors killing an American hostage, Hamas bombing attacks etc.
Of course based on this portrait the occidental world has got (and will keep getting) the idea that there are groups of fanatics, assassins that strike Israel, make carnages, attempt to gain the power with barbaric methods to the detriment of the Israeli population.
1 – Palestinian Liberation Organisation
“Terra Nullius” principle
During the colonial period the western countries (not all of them but most of) were constantly pursuing new lands and natural resources and the “normal” way to achieve this was to move to a certain territory, fight off or kill the inhabitants and take what they needed (as simple as that).
In order to find a plausible justification to these actions they introduced the concept of Terra Nullius, that is: “there are lands/territories that none owns, inhabited by barbaric or savage populations, on those lands we have the right to move, take what we want, colonise and dominate”.
Palestine was indeed seen as one of these lands. Theodor Herzl, the greatest Zionist ever lived (he died in 1904) defined Palestine as a land not owned by any population and therefore eligible to be given to a population that was not owning any land at that time (the Jews).
Let’s take a few minutes and double think about this statement from Theodor Herzl and it will be clear what has been happening in Palestine from the latest 1800 up till today. This was and still is the “driving reason” behind the Israeli acts, they consider themselves an “higher class” population that have colonised a savage land with barbaric inhabitants, not even worth to be considered as a population. They have the right to colonise and impose their culture with Palestinians not able to claim any land because as a matter of fact they never existed as population.
Golda Meir, Israeli prime minister during the 70’s (famous for being prime minister during the Monaco Olympic games’ massacre) said:
Who should we give back the land if there is none to give it to?
This ignorant woman was from Milwaukee (USA) and clearly had a line of thinking arising directly from the Berlin conference (2) ; she was indeed convinced that a Palestinian population never existed and that, as the Zionists were used to say, there were just some sparse Arabic tribes.
This is of course completely wrong because prior to the Zionists’ arrival from Europe, the Arabic Palestinian population was well-established in the area and more important, it was living in perfect harmony with the Jewish population already living in that area.
2 – The Berlin Conference, also known as the Congo conference, set the rules for the European colonisation and trade in Africa during the New Imperialism period, 1884-85
A pacific cohabitation of Arabs and Jews
Some important and renowned rabbis of 20 th century demonstrated that when the state of Israel was first settled, before the coming of the Zionists, the Jews population was living in pacific, and in some cases, ideal conditions.
On 16 th July 1974 rabbi Yosef Dushinsky provided an important and unquestionable deposition during the UN conference on Palestine (3)
Since the beginning of the immigration of the European orthodox Jews in Palestine (i.e. prior to the Zionist period) there hasn’t ever been a single circumstance when the Arabs made any stand. On the contrary, those Jews were very welcomed given all the economical and development benefits indirectly provided to the local population.
Several years later Baruch Kaplan (a rabbi well known in USA thanks for his work at the Yaakov Girls School as well for his influence on the American Jewish community) provided a similar statement (4)
the Arabs have always been quite friendly and we, Jews, have lived together with them in Hebron under friendship relationships; I know about a letter of the great rabbi of Gerrer Hassidim, the Polish Avraham Mordechai Alter, regarding his travel to the Holy Land (5) dated back to the period when we were considering to move there (i.e. end of 1800). The aim of his travel was to understand what sort of people the Palestinians were and whether it was worth for the rest of the Jews to move there. In this letter he described the Arabs as a friendly and quite likeable population.
At some point in history the situation changed drastically, we moved from a situation were the Jewish immigration in Palestine was considered as a positive thing from both populations (Arabs and Jews) to a situation were this immigration has turned first into a political problem and then degenerated into conflicts, a war and finally the tragedy of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population.
3 – Statement to the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine July 16, 1947 by Chief Rabbi Yoseftzvi Dushinsky, http://www.nkusa.org/Historical_Documents/dushinksy.cfm
4 – Interview with rabbi Baruch Kaplan, link: http://www.nkusa.org/Historical_Documents/KaplanInterview.cfm
5 – Historically the Holy Land was the territory of both Palestine and Israel
The choice of Palestine as home for the Jews
The Jewish populations living in Europe were actively looking for a nation to find a shelter given that they were constantly running away from the European persecutions (we are in a period of time prior to the Holocaust and after the Berlin conference, end of ’800 beginning of ’900). Important Jewish intellectuals started to wonder where this nation/land could be actually found.
Moses Hess was one of the most influential intellectuals (6) , he started to wonder about the possibility to move back to the Suez channel but he realized that this was a rather impossible option because that area was already under jurisdiction of the British as well as part of the Arabs, and they would doubtfully agree to welcome the Jewish immigrants.
After Hess another Zionist intellectual, Leon Pinsker, started to think about a solution suggesting both USA and Turkey as possible destinations; he wrote:
We must go either to the USA and arrange a state close to the Canadian border or to Turkey.
Then came Theodor Herzl who suggested Argentina first and then Palestine.
The fact that he first thought of Argentina as a possible solution is quite important in this context. This is a prove that the first intellectuals did not have any biblical linkage with the Palestine, actually Pinsker (7) said:
it is better to stay away from Palestine because we don’t want to have anything to deal with the ultra-orthodox biblical remembrance…
Unfortunately all the projects, the enquiries and the diplomatic contacts went all wrong and in the end the Palestine was selected as the only possible choice.
At this point the groups of Jews nationalist (so called Zionist) started to emigrate from Europe toward the Palestine. At the end of 1800, right after the World Zionist movement conference in Basel (1897) a significant amount of Jews started to approach Palestine. This new wave of immigration was very different from the one happening previously both in numbers and means. This new wave was driven by that ideology started by Theodor Herzl and successively promulgated by the Zionist intellectuals whose fundamentals lie in the Terra Nullius principle. They started then to think of a right belonging to the “superior” Jewish population to take the land they decided to be owned by Israel and expel the Arabs population.
It is now clear that the project of expropriation and ethnic cleansing in Palestine was defined and initiated about 40 years before the Nazi holocaust.
Just to make emphasis on how this plan was strongly established I will report some interesting quotes from influential Zionist intellectuals. Tehodor Herzl explicitly wrote (quote dated some years before his death, occurred in 1904) (8):
We will try to push Palestinian population in misery beyond the borders and we will provide them employments only in the transit areas denying any job on our land; both the expropriation and the expulsion process has to be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.
Another Zionist leader, doctor Eder, in 1921 said (9):
… there will be only one nation in Palestine, the Jewish one, there will not be any equality between Jews and Arabs, but a Jewish preponderance as soon as the numbers of the race are sufficiently increased.
Ben Gurion (he started his activity in the Zionist movement in the beginning of 1900) declared (10)
We need to use terror, murders, intimidations, confiscations of their land in order to sweep the Arab population from the Galilee.
There is a significant amount of these quotes but the last one that I want to report is very important because it comes from the man considered the biggest humanist of the Zionist Jews community (those that effectively founded the state of Israel); its name is Ahad Ha’am and in the end of ’800, during the first Zionist colonisation in Palestine, he wrote (11):
… they (the Jews) were in the lands of the Diaspora, and suddenly they find themselves in freedom (in Palestine); and this change has awakened in them an inclination to despotism. They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause, and even boast of these deeds; and nobody among us opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination.
6 – He was a communist militant and collaborator of Karl Marx
7 – Auto-emancipation,Leon Pinsker, 1882
8 – John Quigley, Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice
9 – Quoted in Sami Hadawi, Bitter Harvest
10 – David Ben- Gurion, Memoirs
11 – Zionist writer quoted in Sami Hadawi, Bitter Harvest
The British treason
At the end of ’800 Palestine was under control of the Ottoman Empire which happened to disappear after the first world war. In 1916 the Sikes-Picot agreement was establishing the subdivision of the Middle-East (including Palestine) among France, Russia and Great Britain, few years later following the Sevres agreement Great Britain became the colonial power in charge of Palestine.
The British dominance in the area was not neutral at all but rather skewed towards the Jews; the role of Great Britain was only apparently neutral, they were indeed traitors.
At the end of ’800 Chaim Weizmann (who will later become the first president of Israel) had a meeting with British officials assuring that the arrival of one million of Jews in the area would have brought a new civilisation and helped to preserve the Suez channel (Suez channel was strategically crucial for the British and their trade activities with India). You all probably know about (or have heard about) Lawrence of Arabia, the reason why he left the British army was indeed the disgusting treason made against the Arab populations: the Arabs helped the British during the first world war against the Ottoman Empire with the promise to support their national interests, these promises were then totally disregarded with the Balfour declaration.
With the Balfour declaration (1917) the British completely ignored the promises made before and allowed the Jews to establish a national home in Palestine.
The British government in Palestine made any attempt to facilitate the Jews colonisation. In those years the Jews established: the Jewish National Fund with the aim to collect the funding needed to buy the lands in Palestine, the Jewish Agency for organising the immigration and the Jewish army.
The British directly assisted the Jewish army by providing both training and equipment.
The Jewish National Fund used to acquire (or maybe we should say deprive) the lands from the local population using a rather shady practice; first it made use of the funds provided by the wealthy European Jews families in order to acquire the lands from owners living abroad (Iraq, Syria, Egypt, …) and then it proceeded with the expropriation of the farmers (so innocent people were deprived of their lands, the lands where they probably have lived for generations and that were often constituting the unique source of sustenance).
Let me just give you some examples (there are many) on how the discrimination against the Palestinian took place:
The British required the Palestinian to repay the debts arose during the Turkish domain. Clearly they did not have the funds needed to honour those debts and were then forced to sell their land… to the Jews off course.
The British provided the Jews with weapon and military support but arrested any Palestinian caught carrying just a knife.
The British declared the Jewish language as the national language of the entire area, quite interesting given that the Jewish population tolled 20% against the 80% Arabic.
The state-owned assets were given entirely to the Jews.
The exploitation of the salt reserves from the Dead Sea were given exclusively to the Jews.
Production and management of the electric power plant only for the Jews.
This disgusting pro-Israel management by the British went on for years and even if anger and frustration started to emerge, the local Palestinian population was apparently quite until 1920 when the first conflicts took place.
The first conflicts and the attempt to reach an agreement
In response to the conflicts arisen in 1920 the British tried to stem the situation by advancing an agreement. They proposed to divide the land 50-50 between Palestinian and Jews, quite unfair considering that the 80% of the entire population was Arab against the 20% Jews and the Arabs were, as a matter of facts, the resident population of the area. Because of this unfavourable conditions the Palestinians refused the agreement in the first place.
The refusal by the Arabs led to an even harder colonisation by the Jews and at this point, in order to face the rising expropriations and acts of violence, the Arabs then decided to accept the agreement (even if it was clearly at their costs 50% was better than nothing). But this time it was the Jews that refused to honour the pact, they did realise that given their superior position they could eventually deprive more and more the local population.
At this point the British made other two attempts aiming to find a mediation.
First they issued the Peel report that did not succeeded because it was, again, unfairly skewed against the Arabs. Then in 1939 they issued the White Book in which, for the first time after 40 years (19 years since their mandate), the Arabs needs were accounted for. Sadly even this second attempt failed after the refusal of the British to allow the Palestinians to establish in their own nation.Unfortunately while the British were attempting to solve a situation that was clearly out of their control the future of the Palestinian population was already written (with blood…), the Zionist plans of deportation and ethnic cleansing was already completely designed by 1939. An example: already in 1930 the Zionist Yossef Weitz had prepared a report for the Israeli military entourage containing a list of all the Palestinian villages with detailed instructions on how to attack and expel the inhabitants.
“Neo-Nazi” massacres accomplished by Israel
By 1939 the British had completely lost control over the area and all the mediation attempts got nowhere. Europe was struck by the second world war with the holocaust and all the Nazi persecutions that we all know about. In 1947 Great Britain decided to relieve themselves from this burden and desisted from their mandate in the area (12).
The series of events that happened by 1947 had already deeply marked the history of Palestine: about 250,000 Palestinians been thrown away from their lands, their villages set on fire or burned to the ground in order to make place for Jews properties and instalments.
The Israeli army was divided in different groups: the Haganah was the official one and then there were other terrorist groups (they were so called by the British officials) like the Irgum and the Stern (the paramilitary group of the Palamch).
It was these terror groups that executed all the deportations and expropriations of the villages (the 250,000 people mentioned above).
Today these events are probably unknown to the majority of us but certainly they were not back in those years to the public opinion.
Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt publicised on the New York Times (December 1948) a letter in which they acknowledged the Freedom Party of Menachem Begin (he will later become Israel prime minister but during his militancy in the Irgum he accomplished several massacres against the Palestinian population) as an organisation whose political and social methods were closely related to the Nazi and fascist parties.
Aharon Cizling, minister of agriculture during the first Israel government wrote in a reserved document (1948) (13):
… now the Jews too have behaved like Nazis and my entire being is shaken.
Let’s take a few minutes and think about this latest paragraphs: we are in 1948, just three years after the end of the second world war, the world is facing the truth about the Nazis regime and the tragedy of the concentration camps and still three important intellectuals (and many others) dares to compare the Zionists to the Nazis.
They surely understood how the events evolved so far and how they will in the future. Remember the list of villages targeted for destruction by Yossef Weitz in the 1930? That was one the crucial steps towards the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Another subject that had an important role is Ben Gurion. He formed a group of men whose aim was to plan and organise the ethnic extermination of the Palestinian population; among those men there was Yitzhak Rabin , Yitzhak Pundak ,Moshe Dayan, Moshe Carmel, Yossef Weitz, Yigal Allon and Yigael Yadin (all famous names in Israel history). This group used to meet in a place called the Red House of Tel-Aviv (citation from Ilan Pappe) and prepared the extermination plans with a horrid level of details.
Here it is a quote from Ben Gurion (14) :
We need a strong a brutal reaction and we must be accurate about the places and the people to be struck; if we charge a family we need to do harm with no mercy, including women and children, otherwise the reaction won’t be effective; during the operations no distinction between innocents and guilts is needed.
Ephraim Katzir, future president of Israel, worked in lab in order to develop a poison that would have caused blindness to be used against the Arabs. Moreover, he commanded the military group Hagnah during the war to expel the local population.
This is the sort of spirit the has driven the Israeli nationalists in those years.They accomplished horrible massacres and behaved exactly like the Nazis did.
The massacre of Ayn Al-Zaytun: an Arab tribe leader dared to protest against the Israeli military because of the inhuman treatment they were reserving to him; first he was slapped in the face and then was ordered to collect thirty adolescents from the villagers. The army then shouted all the thirty in front of the rest of the village as punishment for the man who protested.
Another massacre took place in Deir Yassim, this one is more known and it is also very disgusting! The Hagnah made promise to the Arabs to not do any harm in case of surrender, they accepted the deal but the army decided to exterminate them anyway. They couldn’t do the massacre themselves so they sent in the paramilitary group Irgun leaded by Menachem Begin.
Those were just two examples, the massacres carried out in this period are countless; Uri Milstein (Israeli military historicist) wrote textually (15):
Every conflict with the Arabs essentially turns into a massacre…
This constitutes pure ethnic cleanses, the killing of innocent unarmed people and this hadn’t anything to do with the Israeli-Arab war in 1948. In 1947 the Palestinian death toll reached already 250,000 and 750,000 after 1948.
12 – The end of the British domain in the area will lead to the first big war between Palestinian and Israeli in 1948. The next chapter explains the 1948 war in more details.
13 – During the course of the 1948 war, reports of war crimes (perpetrated by the Israeli soldiers at al-Dawayima northwest of Hebron) reached the Israeli Cabinet. These atrocities shocked Aharon Cizling, and during a Cabinet meeting he stated:
I’ve received a letter on the subject. I must say that I have known what things have been like for some time and I have raised the issue several times already here. However after reading this letter I couldn’t sleep last night. I felt the things that were going on were hurting my soul, the soul of my family and all of us here. I could not imagine where we came from and to where are we going. . . . I often disagree when the term Nazi was applied to the British. I wouldn’t like to use the term, even though the British committed Nazi crimes. But now Jews too have behaved like Nazis and my entire being has been shaken. . . . Obviously we have to conceal these actions from the public, and I agree that we should not even reveal that we’re investigating them. But they must be investigated….
Source: 1949, The First Israelis, p. 26 & Benny Morris, p. 233
14 – David Ben-Gurion, Memoirs
15 – By 1948, the Jew was not only able to ’defend himself’ but to commit massive atrocities as well. Indeed, according to the former director of the Israeli army archives, ’in almost every village occupied by us during the War of Independence, acts were committed which are defined as war crimes, such as murders, massacres, and rapes’…Uri Milstein, the authoritative Israeli military historian of the 1948 war, goes one step further, maintaining that ’every skirmish ended in a massacre of Arabs.’ Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.
The falsehoods about 1948 war
Before proceeding with the explanation of the 1948 war it is important to report a statement by the last British high consul for the Palestine, Lord Alan Cunningham, before the British definitively left the area:
… I think the Palestinian are doing all they can in order to keep the situation peaceful, while the Israeli army is doing everything to deteriorate this situation…
The statement is filed in the official acts of the British government and it is freely readable.
The war of 1948, like all the events that are told to the public about the Zionist oppression in Palestine and about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is built on a bunch of falsehoods.
This war is known to the public as the heroic resistance of the Israeli army against the Arabs armies attempting to assail Israel; the Israeli victory of the war set forth the birth of the modern democratic state of Israel.
First skewness: none ever told about all the events that fore-run the 1948 war, all the massacres, the intimidations and ethnic cleansing (see previous chapters); and so it seems that the Arabs armies moved against Israel with no reasons but the plan to destroy it and throw it away from “its own” land.
Second skewness: Ben Gurion had already found an agreement with king Abdullah of Jordan (the Jordan army was indeed the only one with the actual strength to worry the Israeli army), according to this agreement Israel and Jordan would not fight against each other with the aim of sharing the Palestinian territory once the war was over.
As a consequence the Jordan army never really fought, or at least it did it with relatively low effort, during the conflict. The confirmation of the plan came directly from the chief commander of the Jordan army, a British man named Glubb Pasha, who described the whole conflict with the term “Phony War”, i.e. A fraudulent war.
An analysis of the composition of the Arab armies is enough to strength the thesis that this war cannot really be defined so.
Egyptian army made up of the Muslim Brothers went to war without a single day of training and having only a vague idea on how to engage in a fight (they merely knew how to handle an weapon). Syrian army was a bit more organised and fierce of the Egyptians but never constituted a menace to the Israeli.
The Libyan army never dealt in any of the battles and remained behind the Palestinian border through all the war, it didn’t even try to defend the Palestinian villages when the time came.
At last there was also an Iraqi army (few thousand of men) that didn’t engage in any battle because it was subject to the command of king Abdullah of Jordan (who was under unofficial non-belligerency accord with Israel).
So this should have been the terrible menace to the Israeli people or at least 10this is what the public opinion knows.
Another proof that the 1948 war was just a fake, more an excuse used by the Zionist than a real conflict, is a memorandum from Ben Gurion addressed to the Israeli army where he explicitly incited the Haganah to dispatch the best portion of the army to carry on with the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population rather than to contrast the Arab armies.
The second big lie that the public has been told so far is that the 1948 war was a reaction to the Palestinian refusal of the reassignment plan dictated by the UN. Well, in reality the UN plan was basically another swindle against Palestine.
Just to have an idea of the conditions included in the UN plan:
56% of the territory would belong to the Jews which formed just 33% of the total population while the remaining 42% to the Arabs which were indeed the majority;
all the sea spots would have belonged to the Jews;
the only important harbour, Haifa, also to Israel;
the Arabs weren’t assigned any connection with Egypt;
80% of the terrains fit for cultivation as well as all the orange plantations would have gone to the Jews;
the large majority of building area to Israel;
the entire Negev area to Israel;
and there would have been more…
Now you would understand that it was impossible for the Arabs to accept such a criminal plan that would have destroyed them economically and deprived of cultivable lands as well as commercial connections.
From Ben Gurion’s diaries emerges that even Israel was never interested in such assignment plan and it would have been rejected even before UN could propose it; i.e. Finding an agreement (even a disgusting and criminal like the one reported above) as a basis for a possible peaceful solution was never on Israel agenda.
The 1967 war, more falsehoods
The war in 1967 is yet another falsehood exploited by the Zionists in Palestine.
In those years the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population was advancing reaching such a brutality that even the UN charged Ariel Sharon for terrorism in 1953.
Sharon was the chief of military-terrorists unit (the 101 Unit) when he crushed in a Palestinian village and abducted 64 people (mostly households groups), forced them to enter a houses placed with dynamite made blowing up thereafter.
This massacre got to be known in USA, on the press and mass media, and then the UN Council pressed charge for terrorism against Ariel Sharon.
Of course Sharon, in the democratic state of Israel, would have become prime minister; he wasn’t though the only terrorist becoming prime minister, Menachem Begin would have followed, the same Menachem Begin that blew up hotel King David killing 90 persons.
Another episode worth to mention (among many) is the murder of a UN high official: Folke Benadotte. He was a great person that has managed to save the life of many Jews from the concentration camps through the Red Cross in Sweden; for this reason he was assigned as UN representative in Palestine. He was trying to conduct the same humanitarian mission with the Palestinian population and of course the terrorist military group Irgun killed him.
In the 50s and 60s along with the dispossession of the Palestinian land, Israel started to take over those lands. They couldn’t just go and take possession in a legal way because the UN resolutions 194 and 181 were theoretically still valid. So in order to elude this legal obstacle they invented the procedure “Land Custody” through which they declared those lands as abandoned and viable to be taken in custody; after a certain time the Jews National Fund would eventually take the land arguing that none ever came to claim it. Of course none ever claimed them back since the local inhabitants have been either expelled or killed!
The Zionists even came up with another repellent lie stating that the Arabs fled their villages following a radio message of King Abdullah who was urging them to leave waiting for the imminent elimination of the Jews. This story of the radio message is a complete fake, Abdullah never made any radio contact and the Arabs never left their villages voluntary (the BBC monitored all the radio transmissions in those years, they are all recorded and stored at the London British Museum, and there is no track of such a transmission).
Once the Jews took possession of a land, the Arabs could neither buy it back, nor live there nor rent it. This is basically how the state of Israel was born, through all these dramatic episodes of massacres, ethnic cleansing, dispossession and repossession.
We cannot report all these episodes but it is instructive to report what the Israeli partisan Akiva Orr eye-witnessed: an Arab farmer was walking in front of the Israeli army with a bucket of soil on his shoulder. When the soldiers stopped him he was forced to throw all the soil on the ground because they thought the bucket would contain some weapon (of course it did not), afterwards the poor farmer strived to put the soil back in the bucket.
Some soldier saw him and made fun of the situation asking what he was doing and then he screamed desperately “this is my land! I was born here, this is a piece of my land and I must take it with me! ”. During the following nights the same man was seen approaching the net that was placed all around his village and bordering his garden trying to introduce his hands through the fence into what once was his vegetable garden and trying to fix a few food plants.
The 1967 war is a falsehood, again the emphasis is put on the fact that Israel, this democratic country, tried in every way to reach the peace with the Palestinian population and it is now again under the threat of a new aggression by the Arabs; a violent reaction was then needed to preserve the Israeli population from a new holocaust.
This is what the Israeli population in primis as well as the international media have been told. Even the Jewish population didn’t know the real nature of the conflict either; this is an extract from an interview by some Israeli citizens during 1967:
… well in effect during those days, in June 1967, we were barricaded home certain that the Arabs were coming and a new holocaust would have taken place….
This was clearly a lie, the truth about those days has emerged in 2008 from the classified documents of the USA government from president Johnson bureau:
the Israeli government knew exactly that the Arabs armies would have been destroyed in just few hours and the CIA was completely confident on the fact that no military help would have been needed to support the Jews in getting rid of the Arabs.
In 1967 (3rd June) Mossad leader Meir Amit had a meeting at the Pentagon in Washington with McNamara.
McNamara asked him:
How long will this war last?
Amit replied:
Seven days.
It was the 3 rd June, the war will have started on the 6 th and they already knew the hostilities would be rather short.
The official story about the period immediately before the beginning of the war is that the “cruel” Egyptian president Nasser did a pact with both Syria and Jordan with the intent to attack Israel, an attack that apparently was imminent.
The real story is that Nasser attempted desperately to get in touch with USA and Great Britain in order to avoid the war and while Meir Amit was in Washington discussing about the pre-emptive attack that would have destroyed the Arabs in seven days, Nasser sent his foreign minister Zakariya Mohieddin directly to Washington to find a mediation. Unfortunately when Mohieddin was about to leave for the USA the Israeli army stroke and destroyed the Egyptian army 16 .
This is just another falsehood (just one among many) used by the Zionists to justify their actions, all Israel history is built upon a mechanism of finding a false menace in order to justify their aggression acts. It is always the same story, that is: Israel is the victim and the Arabs are the killers while it is evidently exactly the opposite: Israel is indeed aggressive, it needs aggressions, it needs dangers in the form of military or terrorist threat.
If you think that this is just a mere theory, look what Moshe Shared (a member of Ben Gurion government and later on prime minister of Israel) said:
The retaliation actions constitute our lymph, with them we can maintain an high level of tension among our population as well the army. Israel must create dangers and to do that we need to carry on provocations and reprisals.
This is the model that Israel persists to use even today and still the public opinion has no idea of what it is really happening and why. Take a look at this extract of an article by Amos Harel e Avi Issacharoff from the Israeli newspaper Haarez dated October 2007, one year before the Gaza genocide in 2008:
the officers from the defence department believe the Palestinian military will intensify their attacks in response to the Gaza strangulation. So the real purpose of this plan is to set up a new military onslaught in response of the attacks coming from Gaza. Israel will be embarking in a massive military operation on Gaza and in order to prepare the field for the attacks there is a need to strangle, isolate at reduce the rights of the population living there at minimum.
This article dates back one year and two months before the beginning of the Gaza disaster in 2008 and the model is exactly the same used back in 1967, Israel needs to come up with excuses to assault the Palestinians in order to go on with the ethnic cleansing and accomplish the banishment from their lands.
Even the affirmations of Israeli leaders left no doubt about what the real plans were, here few examples:
ex-premier Rabin reported an episode where general Allon from Haganah asked to Ben Gurion about what to do with the Palestinian population and the latter replied with an hand gesture meaning throw them out.
Moshe Dayan (famous general during the 6-days war):
… there isn’t any solution for you Palestinian people, you will keep living like dogs, if you want you can leave.
Menachem Begin:
The subdivision of Palestine in two states is illegal, Jerusalem will always be our capital city and the Big Israel will be only ours, all and forever.
Ariel Sharon:
There is no Zionism colonisation or Jews state without the banishment of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands.
16 – The former Commander of the Air Force, General Ezer Weitzman, regarded as a hawk, stated that there was ’no threat of destruction’ but that the attack on Egypt, Jordan and Syria was nevertheless justified so that Israel could ’exist according the scale, spirit, and quality she now embodies.’…
Menachem Begin had the following remarks to make: ’In June 1967, we again had a choice.
The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.’
Source: Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle.
Conclusion
From 1967 up till today the events that happened are more or less known to the public opinion but it is crucial to point out that without having a complete picture of the history preceding 1967 it is unlikely to get a rational view of the successive events: the rise of the PLO, the terror attempts by Palestinian groups, the rise of Hamas (one note about Hamas: the creation of this political group was largely supported by both Israel and USA as contrast to Arafat, in fact it was the growing laic and socialist movements in Palestine that most worried them!).
If the public opinion is not aware of all the events that happened before then the general idea will be of a mad Arab population making terror attacks against Israel and the western world. If the public opinion is instead aware of what happened before then it is clear how the violent acts made by the Palestinians, 14however execrable and of terrorist nature, are indeed a reaction to 60 years of violences, injustices and Nazi-style massacres.
A (violent) reaction is not an action! This is the crucial point to understand that none on TV or newspaper will ever tell you. The mass media will never tell you that Hamas is reacting but only that it is acting violently because if they ever told the public opinion that the violent acts by the Palestinian people are indeed a reaction, then they would probably be forced to explain the cause of this reaction.
A reaction to what? Why are they reacting? The only way to answer these questions is to go through the past events as we did in this report but this will never happen… no mass media will ever tell you the truth.
None will ever tell you what Abba Eban, UN Israeli ambassador, told Menachem Begin:
The picture that emerges is of an Israel wantonly inflicting every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood reminiscent of regimes which neither Mr. (Prime Minister) Begin nor I would dare to mention by name (He was clearly referring to the Nazis) (17) .
The horrific events that took place in modern time in Palestine are known to the majority of us, we see entire villages being destroyed, innocent people being abducted or tortured or used as human shields, but still this is today history and cannot be disregarded from all the series of events that happened before.
It is extremely important to understand what happened in the past, it is only by knowing and telling the truth that Palestinian tragedy can find an end and nevertheless to free the people of Israel from all the lies told by their Zionist leaders. No real peace can be achieved if the rest of the world won’t become aware of the truth.
Israel must apologise for all the horror it has done (like Germany did in the aftermath of the second world war) and must recognise the right of the Palestinians to have their own country.
It is also important to highlight the fact that none is even thinking of about eliminating the nation Israel, not even the Arabs; this is yet another lie that has been told many times. Ismail Haniyehche (Hamas Palestinian prime minister) declared on July 2006 on the Washington Post:
We are in favour for a peaceful land for all the Semite populations of the Middle East (18) .
This declaration was kept on a low tone by all the media… and on those days Israel stroke against Lebanon killing 1000 innocent people.
The truth about the Palestinian tragedy must be known to the public opinion, if anyone cares about the faith on those innocent people he/she cannot let the world be indoctrinated by all the grieve lies told by the Israel government and always supported by their occidental partners (USA, Great Britain and EU).
Without this background knowledge it is impossible to even begin a discussion about the right of the Palestinian people to have their own land. The reactions are often like:
Do you really want to allow those Hamas terrorists to have a country? Those cruel fanatic Arabs? Those Al-Qaueda terrorists (19)?
It is more or less useless to demonstrate on the streets or to show on TV the footage of dead children, since without fully knowing the truth the reactions would likely be:
Well! It is terrible to see all those dead children, but it is Hamas that started it all, Hamas is the terrorist!
As long as this is the truth known to the public the Palestinian population (as well the Jews one) will never obtain justice.
17 – Quotation of Israel’s UN Ambassador and Labor Party Foreign Minister Abba Eban in 1981 – Abba Eban, “Morality and warfare,” The Jerusalem Post, August 16, 1981 in cited in Edward Herman, The Real Terror Network, (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1982), p. 77.
18 – Semite means Palestinian and Jews
19 Al-Qaeda has absolutely nothing to do with Hamas anyway but this is another story
Important references for further research on Palestine and Israel
The events and considerations reported in these 16 pages are not intended to be fully exhaustive to have a complete view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with all its causes and consequences.
The historical evidence, however, is overwhelming and is available in fully documented form in the list of references reported below.
The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict published by Jews for Justice in the Middle East.
A Brief Outline of the History of the Palestine-Israel Conflict by Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
Link: http://www.exeterpsc.org.uk/history.html
Truth against truth – A complete Different Look at the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by Uri Avnery.
”Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice” by John Quigley, professor of law at Ohio State University. Duke University Press, 1990.
”The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel & The Palestinians” by Noam Chomsky, professor at MIT and ”arguably the most important intellectual alive” (NY Times). South End Press, 1983.
”Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel” by Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi. An honest history of Zionism by a noted Israeli scholar who teaches at Haifa University. Olive Branch Press, 1993.
”Bitter Harvest” by Sami Hadawi. A very complete look at the documentary evidence of the creation of the state of Israel, by a Palestinian Christian who lived through that period. Caravan Books 1979.
Reports and Letters from Palestine by Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
Link: http://www.exeterpsc.org.uk/reports_letters.html
Puppet On A String: Hamas Dances To Israel’s Tune by Paul Joseph Watson.
Link: http://www.prisonplanet.com/analysis_watson_012703_hamas.html
Hamas history tied to Israel by Richard Sale (UPI terrorism correspondent).
Link: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10456.htm
Emergency Regulations on Property of Absentees by United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (1949). Link: http://paolobarnard.info/docs/Doc.%204%20La%20legge%20sulle%20proprieta%20degli%20assenti,201949.pdf
Israeli nukes, their history and politics by Aki Orr (member of the Israeli Committee for a M-E free of all weapons of mass-destruction) Link: http://paolobarnard.info/palestina_atomica_doc.php
Website Palestine Remembered:
it provides “a comprehensive source of information about the villages and cities that were ethnically cleansed, looted, and destroyed by the Israeli army; detailed accounts of atrocities and any acts of terror, personal accounts from the refugees themselves”. The website contains also documented histories, original
documents and quotes.
http://www.palestineremembered.com/index.html
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