Archive for June 24th, 2018
Part 4. How Israel in 1948 committed Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians, about 400,000 within days in first stage
Posted by: adonis49 on: June 24, 2018
Part 4. How Israel in 1948 committed Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians, about 400,000 within days in first stage
OBSTACLE TO PEACE
Israeli historian Benny Morris might deny the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, but Jeremy R. Hammond’s own research shows that this was indeed how Israel came into being.
The Israeli historian Benny Morris has been very vocal of late in denying that Palestine was ethnically cleansed of Arabs in order for the “Jewish state” of Israel to be established.
In a series of articles in the Israeli daily Haaretz, Morris has debated the question with several of his critics who contend that ethnic cleansing is precisely what occurred.
It’s worth noting at the outset that, while such a debate exists in the Israeli media, the US media remains, as ever, absolutely silent on the matter.
OBSTACLE TO PEACE
The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
by Jeremy R. Hammond
Forget what you think you know about the Israel-Palestine conflict.
As Morris notes in 1948, “The fact that the Peel Commission in 1937 supported the transfer of Arabs out of the Jewish state-to-be without doubt consolidated the wide acceptance of the idea among the Zionist leaders.”[14]
“Once the Peel Commission had given the idea its imprimatur, . . . the floodgates were opened. Ben-Gurion, Weizmann, Shertok, and others—a virtual consensus—went on record in support of transfer at meetings of the JAE [Jewish Agency Executive] at the Twentieth Zionist Congress (in August 1937, in Zurich) and in other forums.”[15]
Chaim Weizmann, for example, in January 1941 told the Soviet ambassador to London, Ivan Maiskii, “If half a million Arabs could be transferred, two million Jews could be put in their place.”[16]
The Zionist leader who would become Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, after the Peel Commission had recommended the “compulsory transfer” of Arabs, expressed his acceptance of the partition plan as a pragmatic first step toward the ultimate goal of establishing a Jewish state over all of the territory of Palestine.
On October 5, 1937, he wrote to his son (underlined emphasis in original):
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure. But the country that they are partitioning is not in our actual possession; it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English.
What is in our actual possession is a small portion, less than what they are proposing for a Jewish state. If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant.
But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have, though of course much less than we merit and desire. . . . What we really want is Not that the land remain whole and unified. What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish. A unified Eretz Israeli [sic] would be no source of satisfaction for me—if it were Arab.
Note: The partition gave the Jews 57% of the land while they were barely 40% of the entire population
Acceptance of “a Jewish state on only part of the land”, Ben-Gurion continued, was “not the end but the beginning.”
In time, the Jews would settle the rest of the land, “through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors, or through some other means” (emphasis added).
If the Arabs didn’t acquiesce to the establishment of a Jewish state in the place of Palestine, then the Jews would “have to talk to them in a different language” and might be “compelled to use force” to realize their goals.[17]
“My approach to the solution of the question of the Arabs in the Jewish state”, said Ben-Gurion in June 1938, “is their transfer to Arab countries.”
The same year, he told the Jewish Agency Executive, “I am for compulsory transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it.”[18]
The idea of partitioning Palestine was resurrected by the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), which had drawn up the plan endorsed by the UN General Assembly in Resolution 181 on November 29, 1947.
This plan, too, contained the inherent problem of a sizable population of Arabs who would remain within the boundaries of the proposed Jewish state.
Benny Morris documents the attitude of the Zionist leadership with respect to this dilemma:
The Zionists feared that the Arab minority would prefer, rather than move to the Arab state, to accept the citizenship. Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure. But the country that they are partitioning is not in our actual possession; it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English.
And “we are interested in less Arabs who will be citizens of the Jewish state,” said Golda Myerson Meir (who will become PM and replace Ashkol in 1968, and who pronounced :There are No Palestinians”), acting head of the Jewish Agency Political Department.
Yitzhak Gruenbaum, a member of the Jewish Agency Executive and head of its Labor Department, thought that Arabs who remained in the Jewish state but were citizens of the Arab state would constitute “a permanent irredenta.”
Ben-Gurion thought that the Arabs remaining in the Jewish state, whether citizens of the Arab or Jewish state, would constitute an irredenta—and in the event of war, they would become a “Fifth Column.”
If they are citizens of the Arab state, argued Ben-Gurion, “[we] would be able to expel them,” but if they were citizens of the Jewish state, “we will be able only to jail them. And it is better to expel them than jail them.”
So it was better not to facilitate their receipt of Jewish state citizenship. But Ben-Gurion feared that they would prefer this citizenship.
Eli‘ezer Kaplan, the Jewish Agency’s treasurer, added: “Our young state will not be able to stand such a large number of strangers in its midst.”[19]
In sum, there was a consensus that such a sizable population of Arabs within the borders of their desired “Jewish state” was unacceptable.
The events that followed must be analyzed within the context of this explicit understanding among the Zionist leadership that, one way or another, a large number of Arabs would have to go.
Ruins of the former Arab village of Bayt Jibrin, in the West Bank west of Hebron. (Public Domain)
Trump takes children hostages. To please whom? Which US institutions?
Posted by: adonis49 on: June 24, 2018
Trump’s child hostages
2,300 children have been torn from their parents and put in cages as part of Trump’s latest sick political game! (I saw that on TV)
After a massive outcry, Trump just said he’d stop separating families.
But that does nothing for those already torn apart.
These child hostages were rounded up into cages, then locked-in under lights blaring 24 hours a day.
‘Mami!’, ‘Papa!’ they sob, but workers at detention centers can’t even touch them to comfort them! And most don’t have lawyers to get them out.
But there’s something we can do right now to help them.
Trump’s been using these innocent children as political pawns to strong-arm Congress to give him the money he wants to build his wall on the US-Mexico border.
After weeks of lying, public outrage finally pushed him to end the brutal separation policy — but while families now may get to stay together, children will still be held in cages with their parents, like animals!
And for the children already separated, nothing has changed — except the spotlight has shifted, making it even harder for them to get the help they need.
There’s no plan to release them or find their parents. They’re still being held in cages or makeshift tents, sleeping on cold floors, alone, and they aren’t allowed access to their parents.
The long-term psychological effects are chilling.
Without lawyers, these children may be imprisoned for weeks on end. They may be transferred thousands of miles away, and parents are even being deported without their kids!
But with a lawyer, we could get them out and reunited with their desperate families.
Listening to the recording of the desperate cries of children in a detention center made me sob imagining my own screaming toddler alone without me, in a cage! Let’s come together to get urgent help to these thousands of children, right now.
Let’s show them that the world stands with them, ready to draw a line in the sand to stop these inexcusable horrors.
With hope and determination,
Allison, Meetali, Danny, Nataliya, Nell, Jenny, Andrew and the rest of the Avaaz team
More information:
No clear plan yet on how to reunite parents with children (AP News)
https://apnews.com/8c3d79185d904b2abcc6f3debb9eb870
The executive order Trump claims will end family separation, explained (Vox)
https://www.vox.com/2018/6/20/17485488/executive-order-immigration-trump-families-together
Pentagon Asked to Prepare Housing for Up to 20,000 Migrant Children Video (NY Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/21/us/politics/trump-immigration-border-family-separation.html
We can help make sure the children ripped from their families get a lawyer to get them out and back to their parents. Then we’ll campaign relentlessly to stop the politics that allowed this horror to happen.
What High Engagement Does For You? A list of 10 benefits…
Are the arctic dogs, coordinating their efforts, an example of high engagement?
Drake Baer posted “The 10 Things High Engagement Does For You”
“Highly engaged employees have happier, more fulfilling lives. They do better work, too.
What do we mean when we talk about engagement? Writing for HBR, leadership consultant John Baldoni has a to-the-point definition. Engagement happens, he says, when “people want to come to work, understand their jobs, and know how their work contributes to the success of the organization.”
We’ve talked before about how a sense of engagement is a symptom of doing meaningful work–to the point that the people most satisfied with their careers have the hardest jobs.
But, as a new Gallup meta-analysis suggests, the benefits of high engagement don’t end with meaningful, hard-toiling feel-goodery, but extend into the products that people create.
Beyond what a workplace Jedi has already taught us, there are further takeaways from the 1.4 million employee study:
- Organizations with high engagement have 22% high productivity
- Highly engaged organizations have double the success rate of lowly engaged ones
- Companies in the top quarter of engagement report lower absenteeism and turnover
- Highly engaged business units report 48% fewer safety incidents
- Highly engaged business units report 41% fewer defects (in designed product)
But it doesn’t end there. Jim Harter, a chief scientist at Gallup Research, added some texture to those numbers, saying that:
- Engaged employees are more attentive and vigilant. (the main cause for less defect and less safety accidents?)
- They look out for the needs of their coworkers and the overall enterprise
- They personally “own” the result of their work and that of the organization
- (They) re-create jobs so that each person has a chance to do what they do best
- (They) help people see the connection between their everyday work and the larger purpose or mission of the organization
That is a lot from one little metric. So why do so many companies have problems with engagement? Harter observes that many (organizations) don’t make engagement a part of their overall strategy, leaving its role unclear and hard to execute on.
Clarity is the quickest first step to getting the positive benefits of engagement. Harter tells Baldoni that engagement arises from when employees clearly know their roles, have what they need to fulfill their roles, and can see the connection between their individual role and the purpose of the organization.
This confirms a point made by Jim Kouzes, the Leadership Challenge co-author who we had the privileged of talking to last year. He distilled his decades of research into leadership into a few choice turns of phrase, including this one:
People want to feel like every day they’re making meaningful progress toward some meaningful course. Leaders have to be mindful of always addressing a challenge in a way that creates that meaning and purpose
Note 1: Drake was once a backpacker, now a journalist. Longs for Kyoto, lives in Brooklyn, writes about business for Fast Company and other stuff for other places. Pitch him at first initial last name at fast company dot com.
Note 2: https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2010/12/29/how-high-energy-people-recharge/