Posts Tagged ‘ethnic cleansing of Palestinians’
Part 11. How Israel in 1948 committed Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians, about 400,000 within days in first stage
Posted by: adonis49 on: July 16, 2018
Part 11. How Israel in 1948 committed Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians, about 400,000 within days in first stage
The Expropriation of Palestinian Land
Resolution 181 and the Early Phases of the 1948 War
Israeli historian Benny Morris might deny the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, but Jeremy R. Hammond 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.
Not so, argues Morris. So who’s right?
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.
The Expropriation of the Land
As Theodor Herzl had envisioned, the Mandate facilitated the process of expropriation and removal of the poor Arab peasants by the Zionists, including by denying them employment. The Constitution of the Jewish Agency for Palestine signed in Zurich on August 14, 1920, stated:
Land is to be acquired as Jewish property and . . . the title to the lands acquired is to be taken in the name of the Jewish National Fund [JNF], to the end that the same shall be held as the inalienable property of the Jewish people. . . . The Agency shall promote agricultural colonization based on Jewish labour, and in all works or undertakings carried out or furthered by the Agency, it shall be deemed to be a matter of principle that Jewish labour shall be employed . . . .[45]
A 1930 report by Sir John Hope Simpson for the British government on immigration, land settlement, and development noted that, “Actually the result of the purchase of land in Palestine by the Jewish National Fund has been that the land has been extraterritorialised. It ceases to be land from which the “Arab” (Palestinian) can gain any advantage either now or at any time in the future.
Not only can he never hope to lease or to cultivate it, but, by the stringent provisions of the lease of the Jewish National Fund, he is deprived for ever from employment on that land.”[46]
The prejudice underlying the JNF’s policy blinded the Zionist leadership to the harm it also caused to Jewish landowners. The 1921 British Haycraft Commission report cited an example:
[T]he Zionist Commission put strong pressure upon a large Jewish landowner of Richon-le-Zion to employ Jewish labour in place of the Arabs who had been employed on his farm since he was a boy. The farmer, we were told, yielded to this pressure with reluctance, firstly, because the substitution of Jewish for Arab labour would alienate the Arabs, secondly, because the pay demanded by the Jewish labourers, and the short hours during which they would consent to work, would make it impossible for him to run his farm at a profit.[47]
Resolution 181 and the Early Phases of the 1948 War
Despite their best efforts, by the end of the Mandate, the Jewish settlers had managed to acquire only about 7 percent of the land in Palestine. Arabs owned more land than Jews in every single district, including Jaffa, which included the largest Jewish population center, Tel Aviv. According to the UNSCOP report, “The Arab population, despite the strenuous efforts of Jews to acquire land in Palestine, at present remains in possession of approximately 85% of the land.”
A subcommittee report further observed that “The bulk of the land in the Arab State, as well as in the proposed Jewish State, is owned and possessed by Arabs” (emphasis added). Furthermore, the Jewish population in the area of their proposed state was 498,000, while the number of Palestinians was 407,000 plus an estimated 105,000 Bedouins.
“In other words,” the subcommittee report noted, “at the outset, the Arabs will have a majority in the proposed Jewish State.”
UNSCOP nevertheless proposed that the Arab state be constituted from about 44 percent of the whole of Palestine, while the Jews would be awarded about 55 percent for their state, including the best agricultural lands. The committee was not incognizant of how this plan prejudiced the rights of the majority Arab population. In fact, in keeping with the prejudice inherent in the Mandate, the UNSCOP report explicitly rejected the right of the Arab Palestinians to self-determination.
The “principle of self-determination” was “not applied to Palestine,” the report stated, “obviously because of the intention to make possible the creation of the Jewish National Home there.
Actually, it may well be said that the Jewish National Home and the sui generis Mandate for Palestine run counter to that principle.”[56]
Given the proper historical context, we can now return to Benny Morris’s argument that “the Palestinians were the ones who started the war when they rejected the UN compromise plan and embarked on hostile acts”. This argument assumes that the Arabs’ rejection of the plan was somehow unreasonable. It was not.
Morris’s argument also assumes that Resolution 181 somehow lent legitimacy to the Zionists’ goal of establishing a “Jewish state” in Palestine within the area proposed under UNSCOP’s plan. It did not. While it is a popular myth that the UN created Israel, the partition plan was actually never implemented.
Resolution 181 merely recommended that Palestine be partitioned and referred the matter to the Security Council, where it died.
Needless to say, neither the General Assembly nor the Security Council had any authority to partition Palestine against the will of the majority of its inhabitants.
(Actually, most of the nations in the UN in 1947 were under mandated power by the colonial powers and African States had Not yet got their independence in the 60’s. And yet Israel was recognized with barely a single majority vote))
Although Resolution 181 was cited in Israel’s founding document as having granted legitimacy to the establishment of the “Jewish state”, in truth, the resolution neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionists for their unilateral declaration of the existence of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948.[57]
When Morris says that the Arabs states had declared their intent “to attack the Jewish state when the British left”, what he really means, therefore, is that they declared their intent to take up arms to prevent the Zionists from unilaterally declaring for themselves sovereignty over lands they had no rights to and politically disenfranchising the majority population of Palestine.
Morris employs this same rhetorical device—a mainstay of Zionist propaganda—in his book 1948 to suggest that it was the Arabs who were the aggressors, while the Jews were simply defending themselves. For example, he emphasizes that “most of the fighting between November 1947 and mid-May 1948 occurred in the areas earmarked for Jewish statehood”—thus implying that most of the fighting occurred on land rightfully belonging to the Jews.
However, the fact that most of the violence occurred within this area is completely irrelevant and tells us nothing about which side was guilty of aggression. After all, Arabs owned more land than Jews and much of this fighting took place in Arab villages and townslocated within that same “earmarked” territory.
It is largely on the basis of his assumption that the land proposed for the Jewish state under the partition plan was indeed rightfully the Jews’ that he can sustain his narrative that, “From the end of November 1947 until the end of March 1948, the Arabs held the initiative and the Haganah was on the strategic defensive.”[58]
“Going into the civil war, Haganah policy was purely defensive”, Morris repeats—although he grants that “the mainstream Zionist leaders, from the first, began to think of expanding the Jewish state beyond the 29 November partition resolution borders”; and its “defensive policy” during the early months of the war “was dictated in part by a lack of means” as it “was not yet ready for large-scale offensive operations”.[59] But the Arabs initiated the violence, in Morris’s account, and the Haganah acted in self-defense while “occasionally retaliating against Arab traffic, villages, and urban neighborhoods.”[60]
Ilan Pappé sheds some additional light on how the Haganah’s “defensive” operations were undertaken:
The first step was a well-orchestrated campaign of threats. Special units of the Hagana would enter villages looking for ‘infiltrators’ (read ‘Arab volunteers’) and distribute leaflets warning the local people against cooperating with the Arab Liberation Army.
Any resistance to such an incursion usually ended with the Jewish troops firing at random and killing several villagers. The Hagana called these incursions ‘violent reconnaissance’ (hasiyur ha-alim). . . . In essence the idea was to enter a defenceless village close to midnight, stay there for a few hours, shoot at anyone who dared leave his or her house, and then depart.[61]
For example, on December 18, 1947, the Haganah attacked the village of Khisas at night, randomly blowing up houses with the occupants sleeping inside, killing fifteen, including five children.
With a New York Times reporter having closely followed the events, Ben-Gurion issued a public apology and claimed the attack had been unauthorized; but “a few months later, in April, he included it in a list of successful operations.”[62]
“Much of the fighting in the first months of the war”, writes Morris, “took place in and on the edges of the main towns—Jerusalem, Tel Aviv–Jaffa, and Haifa. Most of the violence was initiated by the Arabs.
Arab snipers continuously fired at Jewish houses, pedestrians, and traffic and planted bombs and mines along urban and rural paths and roads.” He describes “several days of sniping and Haganah responses in kind”—a typical example of how he characterizes the Haganah’s violence as occurring in self-defense or as retaliation for earlier Arab attacks he identifies as having initiated any given round of fighting.[63]
Pappé again offers some additional illumination that once again calls into question Morris’s assertion that it was the Arabs who were mostly responsible for initiating the violence. With respect to Haifa, Pappé writes:
From the morning after the UN Partition Resolution was adopted, the 75,000 Palestinians in the city were subjected to a campaign of terror jointly instigated by the Irgun and the Hagana. As they had only arrived in recent decades, the Jewish settlers had built their houses higher up the mountain. Thus, they lived topographically above the Arab neighbourhoods and could easily shell and snipe at them.
They had started doing this frequently since early December. They used other methods of intimidation as well: the Jewish troops rolled barrels full of explosives, and huge steel balls, down into the Arab residential areas, and poured oil mixed with fuel down the roads, which they then ignited.
The moment panic-stricken Palestinian residents came running out of their homes to try to extinguish these rivers of fire, they were sprayed with machine-gun fire. In areas where the two communities still interacted, the Hagana brought cars to Palestinian garages to be repaired, loaded with explosives and detonating devices, and so wreaked death and chaos.
A special unit of the Hagana, Hashahar (‘Dawn’), made up of mistarvim—literally Hebrew for ‘becoming Arab’, that is Jews who disguised themselves as Palestinians—was behind this kind of assault. The mastermind of these operations was someone called Dani Agmon, who headed the ‘Dawn’ units.
On its website, the official historian of the Palmach puts it as follows: ‘The Palestinians [in Haifa] were from December onwards under siege and intimidation.’
But worse was to come.[64]
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)
Part 3. How Israel in 1948 committed Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians, about 400,000 within days in first stage
Posted by: adonis49 on: June 23, 2018
Part 3. How Israel in 1948 committed Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians, about 400,000 within days in first stage
And another 700,000 a few years later.
Points of Agreement after the Debate
Israeli historian Benny Morris might deny the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, but Jeremy R. Hammond 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.
Points of Agreement
While there are a number of points on which Morris and his critics heatedly disagree, it’s imperative to begin by highlighting those facts that aren’t in dispute.
First and foremost, it’s completely uncontroversial that hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes by the Zionist forces during the 1948 war—about 700,000, according to Morris, by the time it was done.
Also uncontroversial is the fact that much of this flight and expulsion occurred well before the neighboring Arab states sent in their armies following the Zionists’ declaration of the existence of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948.
In his book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949, Morris estimates the number of Arabs made refugees prior to May 14 at somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000.
In his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé writes, “There were in fact 350,000 if one adds all of the population from the 200 towns and villages that were destroyed by 15 May 1948.”[8]
This is consistent with Morris’s remark that the number was “apparently smaller” than 400,000.
Another uncontroversial fact is that there was a prevailing “atmosphere of transfer” among the Zionist leadership—with “transfer” being a euphemism for the forced displacement of Arabs from their homes.
As Morris notes in his book 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, “an atmosphere of what would later be called ethnic cleansing prevailed”, and, to be sure, “much of the country had been ‘cleansed’ of Arabs” by the end of the war.[9]
David Ben-Gurion issues the Zionists’ unilateral declaration of the existence of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, beneath a portrait of Theodor Herzl (Rudi Weissenstein)
Indeed, the idea that the Arabs would have to go was an assumption inherent in the ideology of political Zionism.
The Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl, who is considered the father of the movement, outlined the Zionist project in a pamphlet titled The Jewish State in 1896.[10]
A year prior, he had expressed in his diary the need to rid the land of its Arab majority:
“We shall have to spirit the penniless population across the border, by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”[11]
Note: The “Christian” Evangelicals in the USA had already preceded Herzl ideology by 50 years, mainly with the faith that the Second Coming will occur after the Jews occupy Jerusalem. They had the same transfer and incremental genocide on their mind. It is the “Christian” Evangelical Zionists who financed and supported Israel politically and economically to buy land, settle and secure the backing of US establishment and institutions.
In 1937, the British Peel Commission proposed that Palestine be partitioned into separate Jewish and Arab states, but there was a problem: there would remain an estimated 225,000 Arabs in the area proposed for the Jewish state. (The Hews were less of that number in the proposed part)
“Sooner or later there should be a transfer of land and, as far as possible, an exchange of population”, the Commission concluded.
It proceeded to draw attention to the “instructive precedent” of an agreement between the governments of Greece and Turkey in the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish War of 1922 that determined that “Greek nationals of the Orthodox religion living in Turkey should be compulsorily removed to Greece, and Turkish nationals of the Muslem religion living in Greece to Turkey.”
The Commission expressed its hope “that the Arab and the Jewish leaders might show the same high statesmanship as that of the Turks and the Greeks and make the same bold decision for the sake of peace.”[12]
Of course, the Commission was not unmindful of “the deeply-rooted aversion which all “Arab” (meaning Palestinians) peasants have shown in the past to leaving the lands which they have cultivated for many generations. They would, it is believed, strongly object to a compulsory transfer . . . .”[13]
Mantra: “Accept existence of the State of Israel if you want peace”. Of what kind of Israel are you talking?
Posted by: adonis49 on: August 10, 2014
Mantra: “Accept existence of the State of Israel if you want peace”. Of what kind of Israel are you talking?
I keep hearing this mantra: accept the existence of the State of Israel if you want peace. What does that actually mean?
To accept the State of Israel as a Jewish State? To accept the borders, and which borders? (Israel has no Constitution and never presented to the UN its borders)
To say that we won’t throw the Jewish Israelis into the sea?
People need to speak with greater clarity.
If the reference is to the acceptance of Israel as a Jewish State, then No.
No, because any state that gives greater rights to members of one group (in this case, a religion) over another cannot be democratic.
No, because any state that deems a group of people living within its borders (Palestinian citizens of Israel) and a people living under occupation (Palestinians) as a “demographic threat” cannot be peaceful. So, No.
Just as people rejected the existence of Apartheid South Africa and rejected the “state of the South” in the US as slave-holders, No to the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish State.
If the reference is to acceptance of the borders – and which borders are those? – then, that implies both the existence of a sovereign, contiguous Palestinian State and the return of the Palestinian Refugees to their villages, as of the UN resolution of 193. If so, then yes.
As to throwing the Jewish Israelis into the sea — is that what is meant by rejecting the State of Israel? – then, of course not, I don’t call for that.
However, it is exactly what so many members of the Israeli Knesset, Israeli press, and a growing number of the Israeli public are asking for: ethnic cleansing of Palestinians