Posts Tagged ‘Theodor Herzl’
How Israel in 1948 committed Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians, about 400,000 within days in first stage
Posted by: adonis49 on: September 16, 2018
Part 13. How Israel in 1948 committed Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians, about 400,000 within days in first stage
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 extra-territorialised. It ceases to be land from which the Arab 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]
Relations between Jews and Arabs in the JNF colonies were contrasted by relations in the settlements of the Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association (PICA) funded by Baron Edmond de Rothschild.
The 1930 Hope Simpson Report observed:
In so far as the past policy of the P.I.C.A. is concerned, there can be no doubt that the Arab has profited largely by the installation of the colonies. Relations between the colonists and their Arab neighbours were excellent. In many cases, when land was bought by the P.I.C.A. for settlement, they combined with the development of the land for their own settlers similar development for the Arabs who previously occupied the land.
All the cases which are now quoted by the Jewish authorities to establish the advantageous effect of Jewish colonization on the Arabs of the neighbourhood, and which have been brought to notice forcibly and frequently during the course of this enquiry, are cases relating to colonies established by the P.I.C.A., before the Keren Heyesod [JNF] came into existence.
In fact, the policy of the P.I.C.A. was one of great friendship for the Arab. Not only did they develop the Arab lands simultaneously with their own, when founding their colonies, but they employed the Arab to tend their plantations, cultivate their fields, to pluck their grapes and their oranges. As a general rule the P.I.C.A. colonization was of unquestionable benefit to the Arabs of the vicinity.
It is also very noticeable, in travelling through the P.I.C.A. villages, to see the friendliness of the relations which exist between Jew and Arab. It is quite a common sight to see an Arab sitting in the verandah of a Jewish house. The position is entirely different in the Zionist colonies.[48]
Had the Jewish settlement in Palestine proceeded along the lines of the PICA colonies, history would undoubtedly have been very different. Alas, it was the policies of the JNF that came to characterize the nature of the colonization project. As the Hope Simpson Report noted:
At the moment this policy is confined to the Zionist colonies, but the General Federation of Jewish Labour is using every effort to ensure that it shall be extended to the colonies of the P.I.C.A., and this with some considerable success. . . .
It will be a matter of great regret if the friendly spirit which characterized the relations between the Jewish employer in the P.I.C.A. villages and his Arab employees . . . were to disappear.
Unless there is some change of spirit in the policy of the Zionist Organisation it seems inevitable that the General Federation of Jewish Labour, which dominates that policy, will succeed in extending its principles to all the Jewish colonies in Palestine. . . .
The “Arab” (Palestinian) population already regards the transfer of lands to Zionist hands with dismay and alarm. These cannot be dismissed as baseless in the light of the Zionist policy . . . .[49]
Another aspect of the Zionists’ land purchases was how it disenfranchised Arab inhabitants who had theretofore been living on and working the land. This was achieved by exploiting feudalistic Ottoman land laws.
Under the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, the state effectively claimed ownership of the land and individuals were regarded as tenants. Subsequently, the law was amended so individuals could register for a title-deed to the land, but landholders often saw no need to do so unless they were interested in selling.
Moreover, there were incentives not to register, including the desire to avoid granting legitimacy to the Ottoman government, to avoid paying registration fees and taxes, and to evade possible military conscription. Additionally, land lived on and cultivated by one individual or family was often registered in the name of another, such as local government magnates who registered large plots or even entire villages in their own names.[50]
The British Shaw Commission report of 1929 described another common means by which the rightful owners of the land were legally disenfranchised:
Under the Turkish regime, especially in the latter half of the eighteenth century, persons of the peasant classes in some parts of the Ottoman Empire, including the territory now known as Palestine, found that by admitting the over-lordship of the Sultan or of some member of the Turkish aristocracy, they could obtain protection against extortion and other material benefits which counterbalanced the tribune demanded by their over-lord as a return for his protection.
Accordingly many peasant cultivators at that time either willingly entered into an arrangement of this character or, finding that it was imposed upon them, submitted to it.
By these means persons of importance and position in the Ottoman Empire acquired the legal title to large tracts of land which for generations and in some cases for centuries had been in the undisturbed and undisputed occupation of peasants who . . . had undoubtedly a strong moral claim to be allowed to continue in occupation of those lands.[51]
Much of the land acquired by the JNF was purchased from absentee landlords, with extreme prejudice toward the poor Arab inhabitants who by rights were its legitimate owners.[52] According to the Shaw Commission, no more than 10 percent of purchased land was acquired from peasants, the rest having been “acquired from the owners of large estates most of whom live outside Palestine”.[53]
In the Vale of Esdraelon, for instance, “one of the most fertile parts of Palestine”, Jews purchased 200,000 dunams (more than 49,000 acres) from a wealthy family of Christian Arabs from Beirut (the Sursock family).
Included in the purchase were 22 villages, “the tenants of which, with the exception of a single village, were displaced: 1,746 families or 8,730 people.”[54] As another example, in the Wadi el Hawareth area, the JNF purchased 30,826 dunams (more than 7,600 acres) and evicted a large proportion its 1,200 Arab inhabitants.[55]
Suba Ruins of the Palestinian village of Suba, near Jerusalem, overlooking Kibbutz Zova, which was built on the village lands. (Doron/CC BY-SA 3.0)
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 percent 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 Arabs 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.
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]
Haifa before the ethnic cleansing (Source: PalestineRemembered.com)
Plan D
Morris’s debate with his critics centers largely around “Plan D”, for “Dalet”, the fourth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In contrast to what he describes as the Zionists’ “defensive” stage of the war, Plan D marked, by his own account, the beginning of their “war of conquest”.[65]
Morris is correct that Plan D did not explicitly call for “expelling as many Arabs as possible from the territory of the future Jewish state”, as Blatman suggests. But neither did it order that “neutral or friendly villages should be left untouched”, as Morris contends.
Under Plan D, brigade commanders were to use their own discretion in mounting operations against “enemy population centers”—meaning Arab towns and villages—by choosing between the following options:
—Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously.
—Mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be wiped out and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.[66]
Thus, while Plan D allowed for Arab inhabitants to remain as long as they did not resist the takeover of their villages by the Zionist forces, it did not order Haganah commanders to permit them to stay under such circumstances—as Morris falsely suggests in the second of his responses in Haaretz.
Nor is Morris incognizant of the critical distinction. In 1948, he explicitly notes that “brigade commanders were given the option” of destroying Arab villages (emphasis added)—which would obviously necessitate expelling their inhabitants—regardless of whether any of the villagers offered any resistance.
“The commanders were given discretion whether to evict the inhabitants of villages and urban neighborhoodssitting on vital access roads”, Morris writes (emphasis added). “The plan gave the brigades carte blanche to conquer the Arab villages and, in effect, to decide on each village’s fate—destruction and expulsion or occupation. The plan explicitly called for the destruction of resisting Arab villages and the expulsion of their inhabitants” (emphasis added).[67]
As Ilan Pappé expounds, “Villages were to be expelled in their entirety either because they were located in strategic spots or because they were expected to put up some sort of resistance. These orders were issued when it was clear that occupation would always provoke some resistance and that therefore no village would be immune, either because of its location or because it would not allow itself to be occupied.”[68]
By these means, by the time the war ended, the Zionist forces had expelled the inhabitants of and destroyed 531 villages and emptied eleven urban neighborhoods of their Arab residents.[69]
Pappé further notes how the facts on the ground at the time challenge Morris’s characterization of the Zionist’s operations as having been “defensive” prior to the implementation of Plan D:
The reality of the situation could not have been more different: the overall military, political and economic balance between the two communities was such that not only were the majority of Jews in no danger at all, but in addition, between the beginning of December 1947 and the end of March 1948, their army had been able to complete the first stage of the cleansing of Palestine, even before the master plan had been put into effect. If there were a turning point in April, it was the shift from sporadic attacks and counter-attacks on the Palestinian civilian population towards the systematic mega-operation of ethnic cleansing that now followed.[70]
In Haaretz, Morris adds that in the larger urban areas with mixed populations, under Plan D, the orders were for the Arabs “to be transferred to the Arab centers of those cities, like Haifa, not expelled from the country.” Morris also writes that the Zionists “left Arabs in place in Haifa”, and he cites it as an example of a place where Arabs “were ordered or encouraged by their leaders to flee”—as opposed to them being expelled by the Zionist forces.
But the details Morris provides in 1948 of what happened in Haifa tell an altogether different story.
By the end of March 1948, most of the wealthy and middle-class families had fled Haifa. Far from ordering this evacuation, the Arab leadership had blasted those who fled as “cowards” and tried to prevent them from leaving.[71]
Among the reasons for the flight were terrorist attacks by the Irgun that had sowed panic in Haifa and other cities. On the morning of December 30, 1947, for example, the Irgun threw “three bombs from a passing van into a crowd of casual Arab laborers at a bus stop outside the Haifa Oil Refinery, killing eleven and wounding dozens.”[72] (Ilan Pappé notes that “Throwing bombs into Arab crowds was the specialty of the Irgun, who had already done so before 1947.”[73]
And as Morris points out, Arab militias took note of the methods of the Irgun and Lehi and eventually started copying them: “The Arabs had noted the devastating effects of a few well-placed Jewish bombs in Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Haifa . . . .”[74]) Arab laborers inside the plant responded by turning against their Jewish coworkers, killing thirty-nine and wounding fifty (several Arab employees did try to protect their Jewish co-workers).[75]
The Haganah retaliated by targeted a nearby village that was home to many of the refinery workers. The orders were to spare the women and children, but to kill the men. “The raiders moved from house to house, pulling out men and executing them. Sometimes they threw grenades into houses and sprayed the interiors with automatic fire. There were several dozen dead, including some women and children.”
Ben-Gurion defended the attack by saying it was “impossible” to “discriminate” under the circumstances. “We’re at war. . . . There is an injustice in this, but otherwise we will not be able to hold out.”[76]
Marking “the start of the implementation of Plan D”, writes Morris, was Operation Nahshon in April 1948.[77] By this time, tens of thousands of Haifa’s seventy thousand Arabs had already fled.[78] The Haganah had been planning an operation in Haifa since mid-month, and when the British withdrew their troops from positions between Arab and Jewish neighborhoods on April 21, it provided the Haganah with the opportunity to put it into effect.[79]
The Haganah fired mortars indiscriminately into the lower city, and by noon “smoke rose above gutted buildings and mangled bodies littered the streets and alleyways.” The mortar and machine gun fire “precipitated mass flight toward the British-held port area”, where Arab civilians trampled each other to get to boats, many of which were capsized in the mad rush.[80]
The British high commissioner, Sir Alan Cunningham, described the Haganah’s tactics: “Recent Jewish military successes (if indeed operations based on the mortaring of terrified women and children can be classed as such) have aroused extravagant reactions in the Jewish press and among the Jews themselves a spirit of arrogance which blinds them to future difficulties. . . . Jewish broadcasts both in content and in manner of delivery, are remarkably like those of Nazi Germany.”[81]
An elderly man and a girl, refugees of the 1948 war (Source: Hanini.org/CC BY 3.0)
It was under these circumstances that the local Arab leaders sought to negotiate a truce, and in a British-mediated meeting in the afternoon on April 22, the Jewish forces proposed a surrender agreement that “assured the Arab population a future ‘as equal and free citizens of Haifa.’”[82] But the Arab notables, after taking some time to consult before reconvening, informed that they were in no position to sign the truce since they had no control over the Arab combatants in Haifa and that the population was intent on evacuating. Jewish and British officials at the meeting tried to persuade them to sign the agreement, to no avail. In the days that followed, nearly all of Haifa’s remaining inhabitants fled, with only about 5,000 remaining.
While in his Haaretz article, Morris attributed this flight solely to orders from the Arab leadership to leave the city, in 1948, he notes that other factors included psychological trauma from the violence—especially the Haganah’s mortaring of the lower city—and despair at the thought of living now as a minority under a people who had just inflicted that collective punishment upon them.
Furthermore, “The Jewish authorities almost immediately grasped that a city without a large (and actively or potentially hostile) Arab minority would be better for the emergent Jewish state, militarily and politically. Moreover, in the days after 22 April, Haganah units systematically swept the conquered neighborhoods for arms and irregulars; they often handled the population roughly; families were evicted temporarily from their homes; young males were arrested, some beaten. The Haganah troops broke into Arab shops and storage facilities and confiscated cars and food stocks. Looting was rife.”[83]
This, then, is the situation Morris is describing when he disingenuously writes in Haaretz that the Zionist forces “left Arabs in place in Haifa” and that Arabs fled Haifa because they were “ordered or encouraged by their leaders”.
We can also compare Morris’s account of how the village of Lifta came to be emptied of its Arab inhabitants with Ilan Pappé’s. 1984 contains only one mention of Lifta, a single sentence in which Morris characterizes it as another example of how Arabs fled upon the orders of their leadership: “For example, already on 3–4 December 1947 the inhabitants of Lifta, a village on the western edge of Jerusalem, were ordered to send away their women and children (partly in order to make room for incoming militiamen).”[84]
Pappé tells a remarkably different story, describing Lifta, with its population of 2,500, as “one of the very first to be ethnically cleansed”:
Social life in Lifta revolved around a small shipping centre, which included a club and two coffee houses. It attracted Jerusalemites as well, as no doubt it would today were it still there. One of the coffee houses was the target of the Hagana when it attacked on 28 December 1947. Armed with machine guns the Jews sprayed the coffee house, while members of the Stern Gang stopped a bus nearby and began firing into it randomly. This was the first Stern Gang operation in rural Palestine; prior to the attack, the gang had issued pamphlets to its activists: ‘Destroy Arab neighbourhoods and punish Arab villages.’
The involvement of the Stern Gang in the attack on Lifta may have been outside the overall scheme of the Hagana in Jerusalem, according to the Consultancy [i.e., Ben-Gurion and his close advisors], but once it had occurred it was incorporated into the plan. In a pattern that would repeat itself, creating faits accomplis became part of the overall strategy.
The Hagana High Command at first condemned the Stern Gang attack at the end of December, but when they realized that the assault had caused the villagers to flee, they ordered another operation against the same village on 11 January in order to complete the expulsion. The Hagana blew up most of the houses in the village and drove out all the people who were still there.[85]
The lesson learned was also applied in Jerusalem. On February 7, 1948, Ben-Gurion went to see Lifta for himself and that evening reported to a council of the Mapai party in Jerusalem:
When I come now to Jerusalem, I feel I am in a Jewish (Ivrit) city. This is a feeling I only had in Tel-Aviv or in an agricultural farm. It is true that not all of Jerusalem is Jewish, but it has in it already a huge Jewish bloc: when you enter the city through Lifta and Romema, through Mahaneh Yehuda, King George Street and Mea Shearim—there are no Arabs. One hundred percent Jews.
Ever since Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans—the city was not as Jewish as it is now. In many Arab neighbourhoods in the West you do not see even one Arab. I do not suppose it will change. And what happened in Jerusalem and in Haifa—can happen in large parts of the country. If we persist it is quite possible that in the next six or eight months there will be considerable changes in the country, very considerable, and to our advantage. There will certainly be considerable changes in the demographic composition of the country.[86]
Note that all of this happened well before explicit orders were given to destroy villages and expel their inhabitants if anyone resisted occupation by the Zionist forces. From mid-March onward, in Morris’s own words, “In line with Plan D, Arab villages were henceforward to be leveled to prevent their reinvestment by Arab forces; the implication was that their inhabitants were to be expelled and prevented from returning.”[87] The Haganah “embarked on a campaign of clearing areas of Arab inhabitants and militia forces and conquering and leveling villages”.[88] Plan D implemented a “new policy, of permanently occupying and/or razing villages and of clearing whole areas of Arabs”.[89]
Morris’s contention that what happened wasn’t ethnic cleansing because most Palestinians fled, as opposed to being expelled by the Zionist forces, becomes a moot distinction in light of how, for example, a massacre that occurred in the Arab village of Deir Yassin in April was “amplified through radio broadcasts . . . to encourage a mass Arab exodus from the Jewish state-to-be.”[90]
David Ben-Gurion (center) with Yitzhak Rabin and Yigal Allon during the 1948 war (Israel Defense Forces/CC BY-NC 2.0)
In the Galilee, “the Arab inhabitants of the towns of Beit Shean (Beisan) and Safad had to be ‘harassed’ into flight”, according to a planned series of operations conceived in April (“in line with Plan D”, Morris notes). In charge of these operations was the commander of the Palmach, Yigal Allon.[91]
On May 1, two villages north of Safad were captured. Several dozen male prisoners were executed, and the Palmach “proceeded to blow up the two villages as Safad’s Arabs looked on. The bulk of the Third Battalion then moved into the town’s Jewish Quarter and mortared the Arab quarters”, prompting many of Safad’s Arab inhabitants to flee.[92]
After five days, the Arabs sought a truce, which Allon rejected. Even some of the local Jews “sought to negotiate a surrender and demanded that the Haganah leave town. But the Haganah commanders were unbending” and continued pounding Safad with mortars and its arsenal of 3-inch Davidka munitions.
The first of the Davidka bombs, according to Arab sources cited by a Haganah intelligence document, killed 13 Arabs, mostly children, which triggered a panic and further flight. This, of course, was precisely what was “intended by the Palmah commanders when unleashing the mortars against the Arab neighborhoods”—which, “literally overnight, turned into a ‘ghost town’”. In the weeks that followed, “the few remaining Arabs, most of them old and infirm or Christians, were expelled to Lebanon or transferred to Haifa.”[93]
Yigal Allon summed up the purpose of the Palmach’s operations: “We regarded it as imperative to cleanse the interior of the Galilee and create Jewish territorial continuity in the whole of Upper Galilee.” He boasted of how he devised a plan to rid the Galilee of tens of thousands of Arabs without having to actually use force to drive them out. His strategy, which “worked wonderfully”, was to plant rumors that additional reinforcements had arrived “and were about to clean out the villages of the Hula [Valley]”.
Local Jewish leaders with ties to the area’s villages were tasked with advising their Arab neighbors, “as friends, to flee while they could. And the rumor spread throughout the Hula that the time had come to flee. The flight encompassed tens of thousands.”[94]
Morris adds that, “To reinforce this ‘whispering,’ or psychological warfare, campaign, Allon’s men distributed fliers, advising those who wished to avoid harm to leave ‘with their women and children.’”[95]
Morris’s denial that these events he describes constituted ethnic cleansing seems difficult to reconcile with Allon’s statement that the goal of the Palmach’s operations in the Galilee was “to cleanse” the area of its Arab inhabitants. In his 2004 interview with Ari Shavit, Morris also noted with respect to the use of the verb “cleanse” to describe what happened throughout Palestine, “I know it doesn’t sound nice but that’s the term they used at the time. I adopted it from all the 1948 documents in which I am immersed.”
Indeed, Morris himself used the term repeatedly in his discussion with Shavit, in which Morris expressed his view that this “cleansing” of Palestine was morally justified:
Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here. . . .
There is no justification for acts of rape. There is no justification for acts of massacre. Those are war crimes. But in certain conditions, expulsion is not a war crime. I don’t think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands. . . .
There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide—the annihilation of your people—I prefer ethnic cleansing. . . .
That was the situation. That is what Zionism faced. A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. . . .
I feel sympathy for the Palestinian people, which truly underwent a hard tragedy. I feel sympathy for the refugees themselves. But if the desire to establish a Jewish state here is legitimate, there was no other choice. . . .
But I do not identify with Ben-Gurion. I think he made a serious historical mistake in 1948. Even though he understood the demographic issue and the need to establish a Jewish state without a large Arab minority, he got cold feet during the war. In the end, he faltered. . . .
If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job. . . .
If the end of the story turns out to be a gloomy one for the Jews, it will be because Ben-Gurion did not complete the transfer in 1948. Because he left a large and volatile demographic reserve in the West Bank and Gaza and within Israel itself. . . .
The non-completion of the transfer was a mistake.[96]
Morris’s recent denial that what occurred was ethnic cleansing is also difficult to reconcile with these earlier comments of his. Indeed, that would seem quite impossible, which is presumably why Morris made no attempt to do so after Steven Klein, in his contribution to the debate, had pointed out these words of Morris’s.
Arab refugees crowding a British ship carrying them to Acre, April 1948 (Life Magazine. Source: PalestineRemembered.com)
The Fallacies of Morris’s Arguments
Now that the proper historical context has been established, let’s return to Morris’s arguments and address each in turn.
Morris denies that the Jewish leadership “carried out a policy of expelling the local Arabs”. This denial is untenable. Logically, the goal of establishing a demographically “Jewish state” would require the “compulsory transfer”—to borrow Ben-Gurion’s phrase for it, in turn borrowed from the Peel Commission—of a large number of Arabs.
Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders had explicitly stated their desire to effect this “transfer”, and once war broke out there was a clear tacit understanding between the political leadership and the military commanders toward that end. As Morris himself has pointed out, there was an “atmosphere of transfer”, and commanders who carried out such expulsions were not punished.
Moreover, from mid-March onward, commanders were given explicit instructions for how this “compulsory transfer” was to be carried out. If the expulsion of Arab villagers prior to Plan D had received the tacit approval of the leadership, the expulsions thereafter received their explicit approval. Commanders like Yigal Allon understood their orders very well: it was “imperative” to “cleanse” their areas of operation of their Arab inhabitants.
After Blatman cited Morris to support his assertion that Palestine was ethnically cleansed in 1948, Morris accused Blatman of attributing things to him that he had never claimed. Yet Morris himself had previously described what happened during the war as “ethnic cleansing”—and expressed his view that Ben-Gurion’s error was not doing a thorough enough job of it.
Morris argues that Blatman’s assertion “ignores the basic fact that the Palestinians were the ones who started the war”. Even if we accept his assumptions that the Arabs’ rejection of the UN partition plan was unreasonable and that they were responsible for starting the war, it does not follow that no ethnic cleansing occurred. In keeping with his comments to Ari Shavit, what Morris really seems to be arguing here is not that it didn’t happen, but that it was justified; it’s not that Palestine wasn’t actually ethnically cleansed—clearly, by his own account, it was—just that, in his view, this wasn’t a crime.
And while legal scholars may debate whether such actions were prohibited under the laws of war at the time, there isn’t any ambiguity about the fact that they are recognized today as war crimes—and, regardless of what any international treaties had to say about it, just as immoral then as they would be today.
Moreover, Morris’s assumptions that the UN partition plan was an equitable solution and that Resolution 181 lent legitimacy to the Zionists’ unilateral declaration of the existence of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, are both categorically false.
He bases his arguments that the Jews were acting defensively on the grounds that the Arab states had threatened “to attack the Jewish state” and then carried out that threat by “invading” Israel. But given the illegitimacy of the May 14 declaration and the inherent prejudice of the Zionist project toward the majority Arab population, this narrative crumbles. To characterize the Arabs as the “invaders” while Palestine’s Arab inhabitants were being systematically expelled or driven into flight and its Arab villages literally wiped off the map is simply to flip reality on its head.
Morris denies that there was ever a decision by the Jewish leadership “to ‘expel the Arabs’”. He repeats that Ben-Gurion “never gave [his officers] an order ‘to expel the Arabs.’” It might be true that no known documents, including Plan D, contained those exact words, but the leadership’s intent was clear. Indeed, in the very same sentence he says Ben-Gurion gave no such order, Morris notes that Ben-Gurion “let his officers understand that it was preferable for as few Arabs as possible to remain in the new country”.
His implied logic is that without such an explicit order, it wasn’t ethnic cleansing. This is a non sequitur. No explicit order need have been given; it was enough that Haganah commanders understood the leaderships’ intention to have “as few Arabs as possible”, to quote Morris’s own words, in the “Jewish state” they were seeking to establish.
Palestinian refugees fleeing their homes, October 30, 1948 (Source: PalestineRemembered.com)
Moreover, Plan D did make explicit the operational orders to expel Arabs from their villages. Morris also suggests that since not all Arabs were expelled, therefore it wasn’t ethnic cleansing. But once again his logic is a non sequitur. It doesn’t follow that since there were Arabs who were allowed to remain in the territory that became Israel that therefore the expulsion of the majority of that territory’s Arab inhabitants didn’t constitute ethnic cleansing. Morris can opine that Ben-Gurion didn’t do a thorough enough job of it; but he can’t sustain the suggestion that the lack of thoroughness means it wasn’t ethnic cleansing.
The “atmosphere of transfer” is acknowledged by Morris; yet he asserts that Zionist leaders like Ben-Gurion and Weizmann, who “supported the transfer of Arabs” in the 1930s and early ‘40s, later “supported the UN decision, whose plan left more than 400,000 Arabs in place.”
With this comment, he implies that Ben-Gurion and other leaders changed their minds and decided that a population of 400,000 Arabs within the area they desired for their “Jewish state” would be just fine. Once again, his argument is a non sequitur; their acceptance of the partition plan did not constitute a repudiation of their desire to rid the land of Arabs. On the contrary, it was seen as a pragmatic step toward achieving the ultimate goal of establishing a Jewish state with “less Arabs” (Golda Meir).
Indeed, he further acknowledges that the “atmosphere of transfer” still prevailed in April 1948, but, he argues, this “was never translated into official policy—which is why there were officers who expelled Arabs and others who didn’t.” But, once again, the fact that some Arabs—about 160,000, according to Morris—were permitted to remain does not mean that the rest weren’t victims of ethnic cleansing. Once again, explicit orders to expel Arabs needn’t have existed for us to recognize what occurred as ethnic cleansing;
it was enough that a tacit understanding existed between the political leadership and the military commanders, which Morris acknowledges was in fact the case—including by pointing out that those commanders who expelled Arabs from their villages weren’t punished. Moreover, again, the “atmosphere of transfer” was translated into official policy with Plan D.
On March 24, 1948, Morris argues in Haaretz, Israel Galili “ordered all the Haganah brigades not to uproot Arabs from the territory of the designated Jewish state.” In 1948, he specifies that “Galili instructed all Haganah units to abide by standing Zionist policy, which was to respect the ‘rights, needs and freedom,’ ‘without discrimination,’ of the Arabs living in the Jewish State areas.”[97]
How does Morris reconcile this with the explicit orders under Plan D to collectively punish the civilian population by expelling them from their homes and destroying their villages? How does he reconcile it with the fact that, by his own account, commanders who expelled Arabs and destroyed villages weren’t punished for defying what Morris characterizes as a direct order? Instructively, he makes no attempt to. But he does note that “Things did change in early April”, meaning that this ostensible order to respect the rights of Palestinian civilians was rescinded. As he notes in 1948, the policy outlined in April was “generally, to evict the Arabs living in the brigade’s area.”[98]
So how does Morris, in light of this admission, maintain that “there was no overall expulsion policy”? He notes that “here they expelled people, there they didn’t, and for the most part the Arabs simply fled.” But, again, neither the fact that some Arabs were allowed to remain nor that many fled out of fear is inconsistent with the recognition of what happened as ethnic cleansing.
Finally, Morris acknowledges that the Zionist leadership as a matter of policy prevented the Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes. Indeed, this was made largely impossible by the complete destruction of their villages. He makes no effort to reconcile this policy with his denial that ethnic cleansing occurred. Instead, he opines that this policy was “logical and just”.
We see once again, thus, that Morris isn’t so much arguing that there was no ethnic cleansing as he is that the ethnic cleansing was justified. He is attempting to argue that the ethnic cleansing that did occur—which he has explicitly acknowledged did occur, and which he documents extensively in his own writings—was not a crime.
Benny Morris is entitled to his opinions. But to deny that the “Jewish state” of Israel was established by ethnically cleansing hundreds of thousands of Arabs from their homes in Palestine is simply a display of the very intellectual dishonesty he accuses his critics of.
The standard he applies is telling: he defends the ethnic cleansing on the grounds that all of the Arabs who were made refugees by the war and whom Israel refused to allow to return “had tried to destroy the state in the making.” Inasmuch as their very inhabitancy in the land the Zionist leadership desired for their “Jewish state” stood in the way of that project, he has a point. Their very existence in the land constituted a destruction of the Zionists’ ideal. Hence they had to go. In Morris’s own words, “A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them.”
Beyond that, Morris’s hypocrisy is glaring. He knows perfectly well that most of those expelled were civilians who had taken no part in hostilities. Hence what he is really saying here is that it was “logical and just” for the civilian Arab population to have been collectively punished for the crime some among them committed of putting up resistance to the Zionists’ operations to seize control of the territory they wanted for their “Jewish state”—precisely the collective punishment that Haganah commanders were ordered to carry out under Plan D, the blueprint, by Morris’s own account, for the Zionists’ “war of conquest”.
That Benny Morris applies such a hypocritical standard should not be too surprising. He is, after all, himself a Zionist. As a historian, he has contributed greatly to the literature on the subject, and in so doing, has helped move the discussion forward. By helping us to understand the origins of the conflict, he has empowered us with knowledge that brings clarity on how to achieve a peaceful resolution.
It is unfortunate that he’s lately made such a concerted effort to move the discussion backward again. It is in the context of his own deeply held and scarcely concealed prejudice toward the Palestinians that his attempts now to deny the ethnic cleansing of Palestine must be understood.
Haganah men patrolling the streets of Haifa, April 1948 (Life Magazine. Source: PalestineRemembered.com)
Conclusion
Was what happened in Palestine during the 1948 war “ethnic cleansing”?
Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, author of Ethnic Cleansing, writes that, while the term “defies easy definition”, it can be generally understood as “the expulsion of an ‘undesirable’ population from a given territory due to religious or ethnic discrimination, political, strategic or ideological considerations, or a combination of these.”[99]
The US State Department, in a 1999 report titled Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo: An Accounting, described “the Milosevic regime’s brutal, premeditated, and systematic campaign to expel many Kosovar Albanians from their homeland.”[100]
In a February 2007 judgment, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) noted that the term “ethnic cleansing” was used in practice “to mean ‘rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area’”.[101]
By any of these definitions, ethnic cleansing is precisely what occurred in Palestine during the 1948 war.
As Ilan Pappé writes in the beginning of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, “This book is written with the deep conviction that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine must become rooted in our memory and consciousness as a crime against humanity and that it should be excluded from the list of alleged crimes.”[102]
Indeed, what happened in Palestine in 1948 was not an “alleged” ethnic cleansing, as Benny Morris would have us believe. It is regrettable that he seems to have decided that trying to justify Israel’s legitimacy as a “Jewish state” is more important than presenting the public with an honest historical representation of how Israel came into existence. But far from being “alleged”, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine must today be recognized as an uncontroversial historical fact.
That this ethnic cleansing occurred is indeed today very well documented—including in Benny Morris’s own important contributions to the literature on the subject.
It is also regrettable that the US mainstream media treat the matter as taboo. This silence must be broken. The means by which the “Jewish state” of Israel came into existence—via the ethnic cleansing of the Arab population of Palestine—must be brought out of the darkness and into the light. Only by doing so will the prospects for peace between Israelis and Palestinians have any chance of coming to fruition.

Jeremy R. Hammond
Jeremy R. Hammond is an award-winning independent political analyst and editor and publisher of Foreign Policy Journal. Described by Barron’s as “a writer of rare skill”, he is the author of Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2016), Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman: Austrian vs. Keynesian Economics in the Financial Crisis (2012), and The Rejection of Palestinian Self-Determination: The Struggle for Palestine and the Roots of the Israeli-Arab Conflict (2009). Find him on the web at JeremyRHammond.com.
Tragedy in 3 acts? Anti-Semitism, Israel/Palestine, and Patagonia?
Posted by: adonis49 on: September 17, 2014
Israel & Palestine: A tragedy in three acts
Israel did not arise from the struggle of a settled indigenous people fighting for territorial independence from Western colonial powers.
That was the case in dozens of nations throughout the Americas, Africa, Levant and Asia over the past two centuries.
Israel is No ordinary state. It’s in a class by itself. An implanted settlement by colonial powers that wanted to get rid the Jews in their midst and cut off the trade routes in the Middle-East
Israel was born of the iron will of a small, very close-knit and highly organized ethnic group bent on occupying a specific territory in obedience to ancient mythical religious tradition and highly doubtful historical continuity.
(Or more likely, a spear-head replacement colonial state to destabilize this oil-rich region in the Middle East)

Prologue
Cosmopolitan Ashkenazim and Sephardic Jews combined their leaders’ immense political, financial, media and diplomatic clout to ensure European Jews would, against all odds, get their homeland in Palestine.
This entailed ignoring the interests and lives of millions of Palestinians living there for many generations, which for the past eighty years has meant untold suffering and millions of dead, maimed and injured throughout the Middle East; today, it even means risking a new global war.
The fight for a Jewish homeland is rooted in 19th Century movements promoting “Zionism”: the forced emigration of Central European Jews – notably from Russia, Poland, Ukraine and Germany – into Palestine, as well as North and South America.
The undisputed founding father of International Zionism was Viennese lawyer Theodor Herzl who convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1898. His seminal book, Ein Judenstaat (“A Jewish State”) published in 1896 sets out the rationale, method and plan for founding a sovereign Jewish State, discretely leaving the door open for founding not just one but two Jewish states.
Act I: Persecuted European Jews in need of a place to settle
The Time and Place: 19th Century Eastern, Central and Western Europe.
Historically, Christian Europe discriminated against the Jews. For centuries they were second-grade citizens and were systematically expelled from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Scandinavia, Britain, Portugal, Austria, Hungary, Russia, Belorussia, Poland, Ukraine and many other nations.
Scorned by both Catholics and Protestants, they were segregated inside ghettos from where they focused on retailing and, with time, became Europe’s foremost international bankers.
A Palestinian protester kicks a burning tyre during clashes with Israeli troops at a protest against the Israeli offensive in Gaza, outside Israel’s Ofer military prison near the West Bank city of Ramallah August 1, 2014 (Reuters)
Resistance against them regularly flared, often into bloody pogroms. Zionist activists took advantage of this state of affairs to rally their flock into their movement.
This centuries-long targeting of Jews is called “Anti-Semitism”, and can only be explained in two basic manners:
- Either the majority of Europeans, throughout its vast cultural and national geography and for centuries at a time, suffered a psychological pathology called “Anti-Semitism” which led them to recurrently attack and expel this tiny roaming community from their midst; a mental illness to which the Jews themselves were obviously immune; or
- There exist certain recurrent traits and characteristics of Jewish social behavior that systematically generate rejection by a wide variety of peoples in all of Europe.
- In such a case, “Anti-Semitism” should be reclassified as an irrational, unwanted and improper defense mechanism. Theodor Herzl himself spelled it out in his foundational book explaining that Anti-Semitism “exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers”.
Though “Anti-Semitism” certainly has its religious overtones, its root cause in modern times is not so much religious as it is social.
Contrary to Islam and Christianity which many times rose up in Holy War and Crusading to convert the heathen, Judaism never seeks to convert anybody by force.
Quite the contrary: Jews are such by birth; by blood; by genetics. Religious conversion is therefore not an option. In fact, historically there is only one example of conversion en masse to Judaism: the 8th Century Central Asian nomadic tribe of the Khazars who did so in order not to fall under the powerful sway of neither Constantinople’s Christianity nor Baghdad Caliphate’s Islam.
These converted Khazars are the forefathers of modern-day Ashkenazim Jews who slowly made their way into Europe through Poland and Germany.
Today, they form Jewry’s elite core in Israel, America and Europe. They do not, however, have any significant blood relationship with the Semitic Israelites and Hebrews of the Old Testament.
Within this backdrop, the Zionist Movement came to life as a Pan-European movement.
A Palestinian protester throws stones toward Israeli troops during clashes following a protest against the nearby Jewish settlement of Qadomem, in the West Bank village of Kofr Qadom near Nablus May 16, 2014. (Reuters)
Act II: The long, hard road to Jerusalem
The Time and Place: 20th Century Europe and the Middle East
For centuries, Jews would part company with the hope-filled greeting “Next year in Jerusalem”. Gathering in Zion was a leitmotiv of their hope to one day achieving nationhood in the land of Moses, Abraham and David.
Theodor Herzl, Leon Pinsker, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben Gurion and other founding fathers fought to create Israel however at the turn of the 20th Century; the Holy Land was just not an option.
When Zionists petitioned Ottoman Turkey’s Sultan who reigned over Palestine to give them their state he simply refused. But they continued lobbying, leveraging and promoting their ideas and ideals, whilst through academia and the press they nurtured increasingly liberal social conditions necessary for them to flourish.
By then, extremely powerful European bankers with deeply embedded contacts and into every government, directly and indirectly consolidated and promoted the Zionist ideal.
They used long-term rather than short-term strategies; their names are symbols of the burgeoning international finance over-world: Rothschild, Warburg, Schiff, Lazard, Bleichroeder, Belmont, Hirsch, Montefiore, Goldschmidt, Oppenheimer, Goldman, Sachs, Erlanger, Speyer, Mendelssohn and many other powerful European bankers, brokers and traders who extended their power and influence throughout Europe and the Americas.
German billionaire Maurice Hirsch supported Herzl’s plans founding the Jewish Colonization Association that promoted emigration of Eastern European Jews to America, notably Argentina, a country ranking very high on Zionism’s priority list.
In fact, Herzl’s seminal Ein Judenstaat, includes a key chapter whose title says it all: “Palestine or Argentine?”
In it Herzl points out that that “Argentina in one of the most fertile countries in the world, extends over a vast area, has sparse population…” and would “derive considerable profit from the cession of a portion of its territory to us…” for which Zion’s bankers could “assume part of its public debt…” (The Jewish State, Dover, NY, 1988, Page 95).
A general view of the Jewish settlement of Brukhim which is located near the West Bank village of Kufr al-Deek near Salfit May 26, 2014. (Reuters)
But then a century ago came World War I, which Germany, Austria and Ottoman Turkey lost in 1918 to France, Britain and the US, leaving Palestine as a British Mandate.
The year before, UK Baron Walter Rothschild secured from Britain’s Foreign Secretary Sir Arthur James Balfour a “Declaration” whereby Britain “would 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” subject to nothing being “done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” This triggered a new wave of European Jewish emigration to Palestine.
The 30’s and 40’s, however, brought a new wave of persecution under the Third Reich and World War II, generating in its aftermath renewed support for a Jewish homeland. That was finally achieved in 1948, not so much as recognition of Zionists’ right to impose a Jewish State upon Palestine, but due to unrestricted Western support for the Zionist Plan. Ever since, Israel enjoys a blank check from the West.
Since then, Palestinians have been brutalized and expelled from their homes by terrorist organizations, notably the Irgun Zvai Leumi, which infamously blew up British Military Mandate headquarters in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946 (led by Menachem Beguin, later Israeli PM and Nobel “Peace” Prize laureate); the Stern Gang (led by Yzakh Shamir who also became PM), which in 1948 assassinated UN Envoy Count Folke Bernadotte in Jerusalem as he tried to negotiate a two-state solution) and the Hagganah. In 1948 these three terror groups merged forming the IDF (Israel Defense Force).
The key question no one dares address in the West is: if European regimes persecuted European Jews in the 30’s and 40’s, why were the Palestinians forced to pay the unbearable price of having their country taken over and all but destroyed?
Act III: Zionism reinvents itself?
The Time and Place: 21st Century, the world.
Former Harvard University Dean Stephen Walt and Chicago University Professor John Mearsheimer in their 2007 book “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy” describe in convincing detail how AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) and other pro-Israel lobbies wield huge media, banking, diplomatic and political power in the United States in Israel’s favor, leading to its having its way time and again.
In recent years, however, something seems to be changing. Global public opinion looks on in horror as Israel commits genocide. Rending their garments to the cries of “Anti-Semitism!” and “Holocaust!” doesn’t hold up anymore. As so often in the past, common people everywhere are once again growing very weary of Jewish behavior.
The writing is on the wall.
Surprisingly, in August 2012 a paper entitled “Preparing For A Post-Israel Middle East” commissioned by the US intelligence community comprising 16 agencies (including Navy, Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, DIA, DEA, FBI, NSA, CIA, Homeland Security and Pentagon), concluded that Israel is currently the greatest threat to US national interests because of its nature and actions preventing normal US relations with Arab and Muslim countries.
Then, in September 18, 2012, Rupert Murdoch’s The New York Post quotes arch-Zionist Henry Kissinger saying ‘word for word’,
“In Ten Years there will be no more Israel.” Adding that “Kissinger’s statement is flat and unqualified. He is not saying Israel is in danger, but could be saved if we just gave it additional trillions of dollars and smashed enough of its enemies with our military…. He is not saying that if we bomb Iran, Israel might survive…. He is simply stating a fact: In 2022, Israel will no longer exist”.
Jewish immigrants build prefabricated houses somewhere in Palestine, in 1948. (AFP Photo)
Since this short article spans three centuries, it might be poignant to mention what 19th Century insider and 33rd Degree Scottish Rite Mason Albert Pike (a Lieutenant General in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War) is said to have written in an oft-(mis)quoted letter to Italian fellow-Mason Giuseppe Mazzini. He spoke of “three major global conflicts” to be unleashed over the next 150 years in order to “achieve the Masonic panacea of World Government.”
- First, a World War whose primary goal would be to destroy the German, Austrian and Russian royal families, leading to Communism;
- A Second War, pitting Nationalists against Zionists, leading to the erection of a Jewish State in Palestine;
- Lastly, war between “political Zionists” and the Islamic World, sparking a Third World War, finally leading to the world government.
Epilogue
Here then lies a key question: is the fact Israel is totally out of control, a miscalculation, a huge mistake or is it part of a long-term ongoing process with its respective “achievements and transitory goals”?
Israel has cornered itself into a dead-end street; as it stands it is no longer a viable state.
Are Zionists about to accept a change in Israel’s status in exchange some other extremely attractive – even if less historical – far-off “Promised Land” where 70 or 80 percent of Israeli population can be re-settled in utmost comfort, security, wealth and peace?
Is Argentina’s (and Chile’s) Southern Patagonian expanse that Promised Land as founding father Herzl imagined and proposed back in 1896?
Is Theodor Herzl’s “Project Palestine or Argentine” about to become “Palestine and Argentine”? Will Palestinian Israel become a huge military nuclear garrison? An impregnable “Fortress Israel” controlling the Middle East?
Patagonia: immense, under populated, and incalculably rich in all natural resources. Patagonia: where since decades, tens of thousands of Israeli youths spend their sabbaticals right after military service.
It’s certainly taboo to even mention this in Argentina, a country defeated by the US/UK Alliance militarily (in the Falkland Islands), and by powerful global mega-bankers pushing it yet again to financial collapse.
Thankfully, Chile which shares a strip of Patagonia is far more conscientious.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Zionist movement and mandated powers: Boycotting the Palestinians
Posted by: adonis49 on: April 22, 2013
Zionist movement and mandated powers: Boycotting the Palestinians“Boycott” is a term put into circulation in 1880. An Irish peasant, Charles Boycott, started an action to prevent peasant evictions from the land by landlords and their agents. This is not to say that this was the first time such a tactic had been used.
1. In 1830, the National Negro Convention in the USA supported a boycott of slave-produced goods, a movement which had started among White Quakers at the end of the 18th century. The slave-produced goods boycott would spread among White and Black abolitionists during the 19th century until the American Civil War. These boycotts to restore the land and freedom of peasants and slaves would inspire movements in the 20th century. 2. In 1919, India adopted anti-colonial tactics by boycotting the British goods to end the British occupation of India. 3. In 1935 and for 3 years, the first Palestinian Intifada (mass civil disobedience) used anti-colonial-settler tactics (including the Arab League boycott of the Jewish settler-colony in the 60’s), 4. In the 1960s, we witnessed the anti-South African Apartheid boycott 5. The anti-racist tactics, the anti-Nazi Jewish boycott of 1933 to end Nazi racial separatism 6. The Montgomery Bus Boycott by African Americans in the mid-1950s to end American white colonial settler apartheid in Alabama and the rest of the American South…. There is however a different history of the uses of the boycott Joseph Massad, author of The Persistence of the Palestinian Question, published in Al Jazeera’s editorial policy. Boycotting the Palestinians In contrast with its uses to force the end of race, class and colonial injustice, boycott would also be deployed as a tactic to bring about colonial and racial injustice. Zionism would be a pioneer in this regard. Upon the formalization of Zionist settler colonialism in the 1897 First Zionist Congress, Jewish colonists were incensed that earlier Russian Jewish agricultural colonists who had settled in Palestine since the 1880s would employ Palestinian labor in their colonies, on account of its availability and cheapness. It was in this context that Zionism would develop its racially separatist notion of “Hebrew labour”, insisting and later imposing its regulations on all Jewish colonists in Palestine, namely that Jewish labour should be used exclusively in the Jewish settler-colony.
Israel’s expertise in separation fences and walls was put to productive use with the massive “Apartheid Wall” it built on Palestinian Realizing the difficulty of imposing its racist project on Palestine, a country which Zionism did not control yet, the movement developed the idea of the first racially separatist planned community for the exclusive use of Ashkenazi Jews, namely the Kibbutz, which would develop in the first decade of the 20th century. Lest one mistake the idea of the Kibbutz as a commitment to socialism, Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion, who came up with the exclusive “Hebrew labour” idea to boycott the Palestinians, set the record straight: The Kibbutz was set up to “guarantee [separatist] Jewish labour” and not as an application of socialist theory. As a racially separatist Jewish economy and colony established on the lands of the Palestinians continued to be the primary goal of Zionism, the principle of boycott of Palestinian labour and products would become more aggressive as time passed. Like its parent Zionist movement before it, which used the tactic of boycott to effect racial separation and discrimination rather than end it, the Zionist labour Federation, the Histadrut, would begin in 1927 to use the time-honoured act of picketing. Picketing is traditionally used by workers and unions to end practices involving the exploitation and unfair treatment of workers. In the case of the Jewish colonists, they used picketing to bring about discrimination against Palestinian workers and to deny them employment in their own country. The Zionist picketing campaign sought to boycott Jewish businesses which continued to employ Palestinian labor as well as the goods the Palestinians produced. This was not only confined to the agricultural Jewish colonies in the Palestinian countryside, but also included urban settings where Jewish businesses employed Palestinians in the area of construction. The Zionist campaign would continue until 1936 when the Great Palestinian Revolt would erupt threatening both the Zionist settler colonial project and the British occupation safeguarding it. In these 9 years of picketing, not only did the workers among the Jewish colonists join the picket lines, but so did the professionals and the middle class of Jewish colonial society, including actors, teachers, librarians, as well as Histadrut officials. In addition to the major picketing campaign of the citrus groves of Kfar Saba in the 1920s, the Histadrut would organize “mobile-pickets” where picketers would travel from one construction site to the next in the cities, including Tel Aviv, where Palestinian workers were employed in the building of the first racially separate Jewish city. If labour picketers around the world would harass scabs who were coopted by exploitative employers at the expense of union workers, colonial Jewish picketers in Palestine would harass Palestinian workers who were violating the racially separatist project of Zionism. Picketers would attack and beat up Palestinian workers and steal their tools and destroy their work. The picketers would also destroy the produce of the Jewish colonies that employed Palestinian peasants and workers. This was hardly an exception, but harked back to Zionist colonial practices in the first decade of the 20th century when the racist principle of “Hebrew labour” was first put into action. When Jewish colonists found out in 1908 that the saplings in a forest that was founded in memory of Zionism’s founder Theodor Herzl in Ben Shemen near Lydda were planted by Palestinians, they came and uprooted them and then replanted them again, thus preserving the Jewish character of the forest. Breaking the anti-Nazi boycott Unlike the Zionists who were pioneers in their use of boycotts to effect racial separatism, the Nazis would be latecomers to the tactic. The Nazis would begin to boycott Jewish businesses in Germany starting in April 1933 in response to the American Jewish call for a boycott of Nazi Germany, which had started a month earlier in March 1933. In view of the racist Nazi regime’s targeting of Jews, American Jews and other European Jews started a campaign in March 1933 to boycott Nazi Germany until it ended its racist campaign and political targeting of German Jews. Whereas American Jews, including Zionists, began to lobby US politicians and organisations to join the boycott, the Zionist leadership in Palestine and Germany saw the matter differently. It was in this context that the Zionists signed the notorious Transfer (Ha’avara) Agreement with Nazi Germany, whereby Jews leaving Germany to Palestine would be compensated for their lost property, which they were not allowed to transfer outside the country, through the transfer of German goods to the Jewish colonies in Palestine. The official parties to the agreement included the Zionist Federation of Germany, the Nazi government, and the Anglo-Palestine Bank (which was founded in 1899 as the financial arm of the World Zionist Organization (WZO) under the name “The Jewish Colonial Trust”, and renamed in 1950 as “Bank Leumi“). Bank Leumi is today the largest bank in Israel. The Ha’avara Agreement, which was signed in 1933, not only broke the boycott against Nazi Germany, but also entailed the selling of German goods by the Zionists to Britain. 60%of all capital invested in the Jewish colonies of Palestine between 1933 and 1939 came from German Jewish money through the Transfer Agreement. This infuriated not only American and European Jews who were promoting the boycott, which the WZO was breaking, but also the right-wing revisionists within the Zionist movement itself who assassinated the major Zionist envoy to the Nazis, Chaim Arlosoroff, in 1933 upon his return from Nazi Germany where he had been negotiating the Agreement. Not only would Zionism break the boycott, but its local German branch would also be the only German Jewish organisation that would support the Nazi Nuremberg laws that were issued in 1935 to separate German Jews from German “Aryans” racially. The Zionists, like the Nazis, agreed that German “Aryans” and German Jews were separate races and people. Here Zionist thinking becomes clear on the question of boycotts. Wherein Zionists were using boycotts to bring about racial and colonial separatism in Palestine to privilege colonizing Jews and separate them from Palestinian Arabs, they opposed the Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany which sought to end Nazi racial separatism in the country targeting Jews. For Zionism, what mattered most was its commitment to racial separatism, whether in Germany or Palestine, and it supported only those boycotts that would bring it about. Indeed, as the Nazis in the 1930s sought to deport Jews and render Germany Judenrein (the Nazis proposed Madagascar as a destination for German Jews), the Zionists were proposing Palestine as the destination for German Jews, whose deportation they ultimately supported and were using the boycott and picketing campaigns to render the Jewish State-to-be in Palestine Araberrein.
The Palestinians countered Zionist separatism with boycotts of their own, targeting the Zionist colonies and their products during the British Mandate years. The Arab League of States would issue its own boycott of Zionist and Israeli goods that would go into effect in 1945. Like the American Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany in 1933 which sought to end Nazi racial separatism, the Palestinian boycott of the 1930s and the ongoing Arab League boycott were imposed precisely to end Jewish colonial and racial separatism and discrimination against the Palestinians. Supporting French settler-colonialism From 1948 until 1967, the Israelis would become the major ally of France, which was the chief colonial-settler European enforcer of racial apartheid on another Arab people, namely Algerians. Not only would France become Israel’s major arms supplier and ally during this period, the fact that the two countries shared the status of being the only two European settler-colonies on Arab lands was paramount in its calculations. When the Algerian revolt started in November 1954, the French decided to increase their arms sales to the Israelis. French Generals explained the intensification of their military alliance with Israel as part of the fight against the Algerian revolutionaries, as well as against the anti-imperialist Arab leader Gamal Abdel Nasser who supported the Algerian Revolution. The alliance and friendship between the two colonizing states was so strong that Israel would also carry out military manoeuvers with the French on occupied Algerian territory and would enlist Algerian Jews (who were granted French citizenship in 1870 by France to separate them from their compatriot Algerian Muslims and grant them the privileges of White French colonists) to spy on the Algerian National movement that was seeking to end French colonialism and racism. A few months after the end of his 13-month stint as Governor General of French Algeria, the French colonial politician and later terrorist, Jacques Soustelle, helped to create and presided over the pro-Israel lobbying group Alliance France-Israel in November 1956. This followed Israel’s collusion with France to invade Egypt that year and destroy the regime of Abdel Nasser. In 1958, Soustelle would enjoin not only Israel but the world Jewish communities to support French colonial apartheid in Algeria: “We believe that given the influence which not only Israel but above all the Jewish communities throughout the world exert on international opinion, this alliance would produce happy results for us.” Soustelle’s anti-Semitism and Nazi-like views concerning the alleged power of the world Jewish communities did not bother Israel one bit. Indeed, Soustelle would join the terrorist group Organisation de l’armee secrete (OAS) in 1960 to fight against Algerian independence, which was by then increasingly becoming the accepted vision in French government circles for the future of Algeria. The military alliance with Israel did not only provide arms and impart military training to the Israelis, but also made it possible for the French themselves to learn a few Israeli tricks, including “convoy bombing”, which the French would use in Algeria. This was not all. French officers would be dispatched to Israel to learn new techniques in psychological warfare from the Jewish colonists. French General Maurice Challe, Commander-in-Chief of the French forces in Algeria (1958-1960), insisted in an interview with Sylvia Crosbie that the Israelis were “consummate artists” at dealing with the Palestinian natives. Challe went further and hoped to use the Kibbutz as a model for his pacification program in Algeria, but the triumph of the Algerian Revolution would prevent his plan from being executed. Israeli study missions in Algeria were also welcomed as the Israelis were keen to learn from the French the use of helicopters to fight the Algerian guerrillas. Challe, like other generals who were friends of Israel, would participate in the failed coup of April 1961 against the French government in Algeria and would be tried by a military tribunal. Testimonies by at least one participant in the failed coup stated that the coup leaders were expecting support from a number of settler colonial powers: “Portugal, South Africa, South America, and perhaps Israel.”
Israel’s alliance with colonial France would sour when the French opted to end their war against the Algerian people and acceded to their independence. Not happy with its isolation as the only remaining European settler colony in the Arab world, Israel rushed to support the right-wing French terrorists who opposed their government and began to fight against Algerian independence. Aside from conscripting a number of Algerian Jews, who had joined the terrorist OAS, into Israel’s spy network, the Israelis provided logistical support to the French terrorists. This included support for Jacques Soustelle himself, who was supported by Ben Gurion and was financed by rich right-wing pro-Israeli American Jews who opposed de Gaulle and Algerian independence. Algerian Jewish commandos organized themselves in Oran against Algerian Muslims and sought partition of the colony along racial lines. They were said to be inspired in their quest by Israeli government policy. Thus, just like its support of Nazi racial separatism and refusal to join the Jewish anti-Nazi boycott, Zionism and Israel opted to support French colonial racism and separatism, and indeed to fight actively against its final dissolution in Algeria, rather than join the international condemnation of French colonial policies. Breaking the boycott against apartheid But the story of Zionism and boycotts would not end there. Zionism would stay true to its principles of supporting boycotts that promote racial apartheid and denouncing boycotts that oppose racial apartheid to the present. When the United Nations imposed mandatory sanctions against the racist settler-colony of Rhodesia in 1966, Israel supported the sanctions at the UN but in reality never abided by them. Israel would provide arms and helicopters to be used in counterinsurgency by the Rhodesian government against the anti-racist independence movement seeking to overthrow the regime (a tactic, as we saw, which it learned from French colonial forces in Algeria and which it was now imparting to Rhodesian white supremacist colonists). Indeed the Israelis, breaking the international boycott, would provide the racist Rhodesians in the 1970s with a 500-mile separation fence along the border with Mozambique and Zambia. The fall of the Rhodesian settler colony in 1980 and the rise of Zimbabwe did not bode well for the future of Israel. When the African National Congress (ANC) and progressive allies, who would also be joined by the United Nations, began to call for and effect different forms of boycott against apartheid South Africa beginning in the early1960s, Israel would be a central breaker of the boycott, becoming the apartheid state’s major political and economic partner. Indeed Israel’s strategic alliance with South Africa would be built in the late 1960s as the boycott campaign against the apartheid regime became more vociferous. Here again, Zionism was true to its principles. One of its founding fathers, Chaim Weizmann, was a close friend of none other than the Afrikaner leader Jan Smuts, one of the central founders of modern South Africa. Smuts was such a big supporter of the Jewish settler colony that Jewish colonists named a Kibbutz after him: Ramat Yohanan. It was both ideological proximity and structural positionality that led to the alliance between the two settler colonies. In November 1962, The UN General Assembly resolution 1761 was passed and called for a voluntary boycott, requesting member states to break off diplomatic relations with South Africa, to cease trading with South Africa (arms exports in particular), and to deny passage to South African ships and aircraft. In August 1963, the United Nations Security Council established a voluntary arms embargo against South Africa. Finally in November 1977, the Security Council adopted a mandatory arms embargo. Under increasing domestic and international pressure, the Carter administration finally voted in favour of the embargo. As international consensus was mounting against the apartheid state, Israel would strengthen its alliance with it, not only in military, including nuclear cooperation, but also in providing it with training, arms and equipment to put down the ongoing anti-apartheid demonstrations and uprisings. Support for the apartheid state would come from Israel’s quintessential racist and separatist institution, the Ashkenazi-Jewish Kibbutz. For example, Kibbutz Beit Alfa would provide the apartheid security forces of South Africa with anti-riot weapons to put down the demonstrations. One of Beit Alfa’s main industries is indeed riot control equipment, including water cannons, which it would provide to the apartheid regime in South Africa in the 1980s in a “secret pact”. Kibbutz Beit Alfa, it should be mentioned, was established by the Jewish National Fund partly on lands purchased from absentee landlords and partly on confiscated lands belonging to Palestinian villages.
Israel would also provide South Africa, as in the case of Rhodesia, with hundreds of miles of mined electric fences to protect the racist state’s borders from ANC guerrilla infiltration. It would also build a thousand-mile fence on the Namibia-Angola border to protect South Africa’s occupation of Namibia. Its expertise in separation fences and walls would be put to productive use with the massive “Apartheid Wall” that Israel would build on Palestinian lands beginning in 1994 and continuing into the 21st century. Israel’s breaking the boycott against the apartheid regime would continue until the latter’s demise in 1994. With the fall of colonial Algeria, Rhodesia and South Africa, Israel remained alone as the last European settler-colony across Asia and Africa. The Palestinian Authority and boycott Since the beginning of the so-called “peace process”, all diplomatic solutions which Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) have signed on to are engineered to preserve Israel’s racially separatist project of a “Jewish state” and of racial partition. Indeed, not only does Israel and US president Barack Obama insist on preserving Israel as a separatist and racist Jewish state as a precondition to all peace talks, but also on Israeli policies of racial separation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem which continue unabated with the construction of Jews-only settlements and Jews-only highways on stolen Palestinian lands. In Israel itself, Israel’s state-appointed rabbis have been incensed that Israeli laws do not fully ensure racial separatism. In light of Safad’s chief Rabbi’s call urging Israeli Jews not to sell or rent houses or apartments to non-Jews, dozens of Israel’s municipal rabbis signed onto his rabbinical ruling in December 2010. The Rabbis issued a letter to announce their call to “urge neighbours of anyone renting or selling property to Arabs to caution that person. After delivering the warning, the neighbour is then encouraged to issue notices to the general public and inform the community… The neighbours and acquaintances [of a Jew who sells or rents to an Arab] must distance themselves from the Jew, refrain from doing business with him, deny him the right to read from the Torah, and similarly [ostracise] him until he goes back on this harmful deed”. Unlike the Palestinian anti-colonial resistance which sought to boycott colonial goods in the British Mandate years, and unlike the Arab League which mandated an Arab boycott of Israel, the PA has a different view of economic relations with Israel. Like the World Zionist Organization and the German Zionists who saw the fight against anti-Semitism as self-defeating and saw collaboration with anti-Semitism as crucial to the success of Zionism, the Oslo Palestinian leadership has followed a similar strategy of collaboration with Zionism and of prohibiting resistance to it. Calls for boycotts by Palestinians are constantly assailed by PA operatives, who only recently, in 2010, and under public pressure heeded a minimalist call to boycott the Jewish colonial settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In December 2012, unelected PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, an erstwhile opponent of a boycott of Israel, issued a call to West Bank Palestinians to boycott all Israeli goods for the first time ever in retaliation for the Israeli government decision to sequester PA tax revenues, an action that bankrupted PA coffers. His government, however, never provided any mechanisms or logistical support for such a boycott nor has there been any official follow-up. In fact, when Fayyad announced the boycott of settlement goods in May 2010 as a publicity stunt, it was accompanied with assurances from unelected PA President Mahmoud Abbas that the PA was not boycotting Israel at all and would continue trade cooperationwith it.
BDS, Obama, and pinkwashing Today, it is the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and its international solidarity network that is the champion of a boycott of the racist Israeli settler colony. Like its noble predecessors, from African American boycotts in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Indian boycott of British goods, the Jewish anti-Nazi boycott, and the international boycott of Rhodesia and South Africa, the BDS movement insists that its call for a boycott should be heeded until Israel sheds all its racist laws and policies and becomes a non-racist state. Israel has expectedly mobilised much of its political power to defeat the BDS initiative and has solicited the help of its formidable ally, Barack Obama, who has publicly expressed hostility to the BDS movement and shamelessly threatened the Palestinian people with dire consequences were they to dare to dismantle Israel’s racist institutions. Israel’s campaigns have included what some have called “pinkwashing”, portraying itself as a democratic country that safeguards the rights of homosexuals unlike its allegedly oppressive Arab neighbours. In this regard, it is important to mention Zionism’s prehistory of “pinkwashing”. The first European Jew that the Zionist movement assassinated in Palestine was the Dutch Jewish poet and novelist Jacob Israel de Haan. De Haan, whom the Zionists assassinated in 1924, was not only a fighter against Zionist racism and oppression of the Palestinians, but was also known in Zionist circles to engage in homosexual activities, and that he had a special fondness for young Palestinian men (he wrote a poem about the theme). His assassin, Avraham Tehoni of the official Zionist army, the Haganah, was given the orders to assassinate him by Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who would become Israel’s second president (1952-1963). The Zionists tried to pin de Haan’s murder on the Palestinians who were allegedly motivated to kill him on account of his homosexual activity with Palestinian boys. While Zionist propaganda failed, and de Haan’s Jewish murderer would confess decades later publicly to his assassination, some evidence suggests that de Haan’s homosexual activities might have been an important factor on the mind of Zionist decision-makers when they ordered his assassination, though his assassin denied that this was a motive. Israel’s attempt to rebrand itself as a just and egalitarian society comes up against its actual and stark racist reality. Its opposition to the Palestinian BDS movement is often framed as an opposition to all boycotts as a form of struggle. But as the historical record shows, this is not a time-honoured Zionist position. As they have done throughout their history, Zionism and Israel will continue to support any boycott that seeks to institutionalise racism and racial separatism and will denounce any boycott that seeks to end racism and racial separatism. Their campaign and that of Obama against BDS should be understood in this context of their commitment to apartheid as a principle of organising human life. Joseph Massad teaches Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of The Persistence of the Palestinian Question published by Routledge. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy. |
How democracy fair in theocratic States? Such as Iran and Israel?
Posted by: adonis49 on: March 6, 2012
How democracy fair in theocratic States? Such as Iran and Israel?
David Remnick published on March 12, 2012 a piece titled “Threatened“. I decided to post it with minor editing since I had posted several articles on that topic.
The 21st century began with a fraudulent Presidential election (Bush Junior). And this is maybe in the luckiest of nations. Elsewhere—in Russia, in Hungary, in Zimbabwe—the fragility of democratic aspiration is a brutal fact of history.
To revisit the Arab Spring, one year later, is to celebrate popular awakening but also to acknowledge the distance between the ecstasy of rebellion and the realization of democratic institutions.
For example, in Egypt, autocratic military officers vie for power with varying shades of Islamists. In the Persian Gulf, absolute monarchs and emirs stifle potential protest with petro-lush money, and massive incarceration of protesters.
There is another State in the region that is embroiled in a crisis of democratic becoming. This is the State of Israel.
For decades, its Jewish citizens have described their country as the only democracy in the Middle East. Israel, as imagined by Theodor Herzl and built by the generation of David Ben-Gurion, was not intended to be a replica of the Anglo-American model—its political culture, even now, is closer to that of the European social democracies. Israel structures of governance are points of pride.
And yet, as an experiment in Jewish power, unique after two millennia of persecution and exile, Israel has reached an impasse. An intensifying conflict of values has put its democratic nature under tremendous stress.
When Israel government speaks daily about the existential threat from Iran, and urges an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, it ignores the existential threat that looms within. Reactionary elements lurk in many democracies. Ask the Dutch, the British, the Austrians, the French. The Republican Party has flirted with several in this election cycle.
But in Israel the threat is especially acute. And the concern comes not only from its most persistent critics. The former Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert have both warned of a descent into apartheid, xenophobia, and isolation.
The political corrosion begins with the occupation of the Palestinian territories—the subjugation of Palestinian men, women, and children—that has lasted for 65 years.
Peter Beinart, in a forthcoming polemic, “The Crisis of Zionism,” is just the latest critic to point out that a profoundly anti-democratic, racist political culture has become endemic among much of the Jewish population in the West Bank, and jeopardizes Israel proper.
The explosion of settlements, encouraged and subsidized by both Labor and Likud governments, has led to a large and established ethnocracy (theocracy?) that thinks of itself as a permanent frontier. In 1980, twelve thousand Jews lived in the West Bank, “east of democracy,” as termed by Beinart. Currently, they number more than 300,000, and include Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s wildly xenophobic Foreign Minister.
Lieberman has advocated the execution of Arab members of parliament who dare to meet with leaders of Hamas. His McCarthyite allies call for citizens to swear loyalty oaths to the Jewish State, for restrictions on human-rights organizations, like the New Israel Fund, and for laws constricting freedom of expression.
A visitor to Tel Aviv and other freethinking precincts might overlook the reactionary currents in the country, but poll after poll reveals that many younger Israelis are losing touch with the liberal, democratic principles of the state. Many of them did their military duty in the Occupied Territories; some learned to despise the Occupation they saw firsthand, but others learned to accept the official narratives justifying what they were made to do.
Last year, a poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 51% of Israelis believed that people “should be prohibited from harshly criticizing the State of Israel in public.” (see note) Netanyahu encourages the notion that any such criticism is the work of enemies. Even the country’s staunchest ally, the United States, is not above suspicion.
The current US Administration has cooperated with Israeli intelligence to an unprecedented extent and has led a crippling sanctions effort against Iran. And yet, Netanyahu on visit to Washington this week, has shown imperious disdain for Barack Obama.
In fact, President Obama is a philo-Semite, whose earliest political supporters were Chicago Jews: Abner Mikva, Newton and Martha Minow, Bettylu Saltzman, David Axelrod. He was close to a rabbi on the South Side, the late Arnold Jacob Wolf. But to Netanyahu these men and women are the wrong kind of Jew.
Arnold Jacob Wolf, for example, had worked for Abraham Joshua Heschel, the rabbi most closely associated with the civil-rights movement and other social-justice causes. Wolf brought Martin Luther King, Jr., to speak in his synagogue, marched in Selma, and, in 1973, helped found Breira (Alternative), one of the first American Jewish groups to endorse a Palestinian State in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Netanyahu has distaste for such associations; his gestures toward Palestinian statehood are less than half-hearted. For example, after Netanyahu spoke of giving Palestinians their own state, his father, the right-wing historian Benzion Netanyahu, shrewdly observed: “My son supports it under conditions that they will never accept.”
To Netanyahu, the proper kind of ally is exemplified by AIPAC and Sheldon Adelson who owns a newspaper in Israel, a longtime casino tycoon, and recent bankroller of Newt Gingrich and Sheldon daily devoted to supporting him.
Netanyahu knows that young American Jews are split, with the growing Orthodox community solidly in his corner, and the less observant and secular majority—a majority that is increasingly assimilated and uninterested in Jewish learning—losing their attachment to Israel. The Prime Minister clearly feels that the fervor of the few offers him more than the disillusion and drift of the many.
Obama said: “The dream of a Jewish and democratic State cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation.” Netanyahu and many of his supporters believe otherwise: too often, they consider the tenets of liberal democracy to be negotiable in a game of coalition politics. Such short-term expedience cannot but exact a long-term price: this dream, and the process of democratic becoming, may be painfully, even fatally, deferred”. End of quote
Is Iran democratic? “Citizens” go to the poll and elect the “qualified” candidates as selected by the highest Shari3a council. So what if in Iran there is a unique Wali Fakih (supreme guide, religiously and civil)? Would several wali fakihs, such as witnessed in Israel within each Jewish sect, a better alternative theocratic institution? Is democracy conducted within wali fakihs circles?