Yossi Schwartz, ISL the section of the RCIT in Israel /Occupied Palestine, 28.01.2022
The Zionist propaganda is based on the myth of the purity of the weapons. Namely, Israel uses its weapons only for self-defense and if some Palestinian civilians are killed is because the so-called terrorists use women and children as shields. For many years many people believed in this myth. In Israel itself, the propaganda is that the Nakba is a fabrication of the Palestinians who fled Palestine because their leaders like Haj Amin the Mufti of Jerusalem ordered them to flee and come back with the Arab armies.
“According to the IDL propaganda: “The Palestinian refugee issue originated in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war when five Arab armies invaded the State of Israel just hours after it was established. During the ensuing war, as many as 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled their homes in the newly created state as a result of many factors. Some of the Palestinian Arabs who fled did so to avoid the ongoing war or at the urging of Arab leaders, and expected to return after a quick and certain Arab victory over the new Jewish state. Other Palestinians were forced to flee by individuals or groups fighting for Israel” [i]
Anyone who will say that the Zionist army and not individuals or groups committed massacres of the Palestinians will be accused as Anti-Semite
In another publication, the ADL wrote:
“In the heightened rhetoric of the present day, Israel is sometimes accused of committing acts of “genocide” against the Palestinians. Genocide is a legal term, and in no way do Israeli policies and actions meet this legal threshold. Rather, the sensationalist use of the term genocide in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not only inaccurate and misleading, but it serves to demonize the State of Israel and to diminish recognized acts of genocide” [ii]
This whitewash rhetoric is based on the technic of the big lie: the distortion of the facts and manipulation of the convention of Genocide.
The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as:
“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group“
The massacres in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps were not an exception for the Palestinians in exile. According to a compilation of studies based on UN and Israeli archives, more than 30 documented massacres were committed by Zionist/Israeli forces during the 1948 war in Palestine[iii]. This included 24 massacres in the north (Galilee), 5 massacres in the central area of Palestine, and another 5 in the south
The most known massacres of the Palestinians took place in Deir Yassin, (Jerusalem), Lydda (Lod), and Al-Dawayma (Hebron).
In Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948, the Irgun and Lehi units, supported by Haganah mortars, attacked the village of Deir Yassin on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. During the battle, Palestinian families were slaughtered in or near their homes. According to the Irgun officer, Yehuda Lapidot, the Stern Gang, “put forward a proposal to liquidate the residents of the village after the conquest to show the Arabs what happens when the Irgun and the Stern Gang set out together on an operation” [iv]
Irgun (IZL) and Lehi (LHI) units can be defined as groups outside the Zionist main army (Hagana). However, they were able to commit the massacre because they were supported by the Haganah mortars. The massacres of Sabra and Shatila by the Lebanese Phalanges took place while the Zionist army lit the sky so the murderers could see their victims. Sharon was in charge of the Zionist army and he was known already in the 1950s for massacres of Palestinians in Jordan.
In Lydia, on July 10th and 11th 1948, the 8th Brigade of the Zionist army
took the northern parts of the valley, including the villages of Deir Tarif and Haditha, and the international airport, near Tel Aviv. The elite Yiftach Brigade took the southern parts: the villages of Inaba, Gimzu, Daniyal, and Dahariya. Within twenty-four hours. the two 3rd Battalion platoons were able to enter the city of Lydda Within hours; the soldiers held key positions in the city center and had confined thousands of Palestinian civilians in the Mosques. The brigade commander gave the order to open fire. Some of the soldiers threw hand grenades into Arab houses. One fired an anti-tank shell into the small mosque. In thirty minutes, two hundred and fifty Palestinians were killed. Zionism had carried out a massacre in the city of Lydda. Many others who were in the great Mosque were expelled to Jordan[v]. Many of them, mostly young children and old people died on the way in this death march.
In Al-Dawayma, “According to an Israeli soldier who witnessed the massacre, between 80 and 100 men, women, and children were killed in the village of Dawayma on 29 October 1948 after Israeli forces entered the village. Other sources place the figure as high as 300. Children were killed by breaking their heads with sticks. Several villagers died when the houses in which they were taking shelter were intentionally blown up by Jewish soldiers.”
And then we have Tantura. In the late 1990s, an Israeli researcher named Teddy Katz wrote a master’s degree thesis for the University of Haifa that claimed Israel committed mass murder against non-combatants in the Arab village of Tantura in 1948. The massacre, he wrote, was perpetrated by troops of the IDF’s Alexandroni Brigade in the early stages of Israel’s War. He based his work on 140 hours of audio-taped interviews he conducted with 135 witnesses to the event — half Jewish, half Arab. He was forced to sign a letter that denied the massacre. Katz quickly regretted signing the letter and asked to continue defending his thesis. The request reached the Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case. This week some old Jews who served in the Alexandroni Brigade have confessed that the brigade committed the massacre. The Zionist soldiers killed between 200 and 250 male residents of Tantura following the battle to take the prosperous and strategic village on the Mediterranean coast south of Haifa. [vi]
“They were able to create the bluff, the fake news because no one listened to Teddy’s tapes. If they had, there would be no doubt in anyone’s mind that something horrible happened at Tantura. There was widespread killing,” said filmmaker Alon Schwarz, whose provocative documentary “Tantura” had its world premiere this month at the Sundance Festival” [vii]
In an interview the filmmaker said:
Q: “What was your reaction to mainstream historians you interviewed, like Yoav Gelber, who admitted to not listening to any of the tapes, but who dismissed Katz’s conclusions based on his methodology? With regard to the relative value of different kinds of sources, Gelber said, “I don’t believe witnesses.”
A: History doesn’t belong to historians. Oral history is legitimate. If not, they can go close to Yad Vashem. I don’t buy that argument. Even if we found skulls, they would say it isn’t so. I understand today those historians were among those who silenced [Katz]. [They created] fake news. These respected historians were protecting the Israeli narrative [of righteousness and purity of arms” [viii]
However, being a Zionist, he says:
“I am a big Zionist. People think I am not, but they are wrong. I am more Zionist than the right-wing people who want to settle the territories and then have one state, which would end up not being a Jewish state. I am not saying, bring back the Arabs into Tantura and clear out the Jews. That is not what I am saying. That is not what should happen. I am not for the right of return by any means. I want a Jewish state. My grandparents came from the Holocaust” [ix]
Thus, Zionist ideology is poison as even the most left Zionists are racists.
The ADL like those Zionist historians is simply hiding the truth. Systemic massacres mostly unarmed people in order to commit ethnic cleansing is genocide.
Without comparing the Zionist apartheid state to Nazi Germany, we can use the example of Baby Yar to define genocide.
“On September 29–30, 1941, SS and German police units and their auxiliaries, under the guidance of members of Einsatzgruppe C, murdered a significant number of the Jewish population who remained in Kyiv. The massacre occurred at a ravine called Baby Yar (sometimes spelled “Babi Yar” in English). At the time, the ravine was located just outside the city. The victims were summoned to the site, forced to undress, and then compelled to enter the ravine. Sonderkommando 4a, a special detachment from Einsatzgruppe C under SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel, shot them in small groups. According to reports sent to the Einsatzgruppen View This Term in the Glossary headquarters in Berlin, 33,771 Jews were massacred during these two days”
No one especially the IDL will argue that the massacre of thousands of Jews was not a genocide. Genocide is killing even part of a particular nation or population. It does not have to be the entire population in 1948 the Zionist army, not individuals or uncontrolled groups killed many hundreds if not thousands of Palestinians to force the Palestinians to flee.
Furthermore, the Zionist’s claim that the Palestinians were ordered to leave Palestine and return with the victorious Arab armies is a simple lie. The Mufti ordered not to leave Palestine. Walid Khalidi, in an article presented evidence that the Arab governments opposed the Palestinians from leaving, ensuring that they remain to fight, including the denial by Lebanon and Syria of residency permits to Palestinian males of military age on April 30 and May 6 respectively. He proved that a number of Arab radio broadcasts urged the Palestinians to remain. [x]
In addition, most Palestinians living in the part of Palestine allocated to the Zionist state by the partition plan were removed months before the Arab armies entered Palestine.
The massacres of 1947-8 were not the last. In 1956 the Zionist army massacred 49 Palestinians in Kfar Qasem.
“On Monday, 29 October 1956, the Israeli government and military decided to impose a curfew on the Arab villages near the border with Jordan. At 4:30 p.m. that day, a border police sergeant informed the mayor of the village of Kafr Qasim that a curfew would be imposed starting at 5 p.m. that evening. Hundreds of villagers who had left home in the morning to go to work had no way of knowing about the curfew until they returned home. The soldiers tasked with carrying out the order in Kafr Qasim were informed that they “should shoot to kill at any person seen outside their home after 17:00, making no distinction between men, women, children and those returning from outside the village.” When villagers returned to their homes after 5 p.m., border police stopped them on the western side of the village. Soldiers made them get out of their vehicles and cars, or off their bicycles, and began shooting at them at close range. They killed forty-nine residents of Kafr Qasim (including children) in cold blood in just one hour” [xi]
“Israeli soldiers killed at least 52 Palestinians in the Jenin refugee camp. Having completed their killing spree between 1 and 11 April at the height of the Second (Al-Aqsa) Intifada, IDF troops would have left but for one thing: how could they cover up the killing of 52 people and hide the evidence of a massacre? Those in charge of so-called Operation Defensive Shield decided to enforce a siege so tight that no one, despite global protests, could get past Israel’s ring of steel; it was a total lockdown. It lasted for weeks while the Israeli government did its best to keep journalists and human rights observers away from the Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank” [xii]
It will continue to massacre Palestinians as long as the Zionist apartheid state continues to exist this is like an apartheid state.
Many people ask the question: How is possible that the Jews who suffered from the Nazi’s genocide will commit such crimes?
The simple answer is that it is not the same Jews who were a weak minority in Europe. It is the Zionists who are settler colonialists. What Israel is doing is what the American settler colonialists did to the Indians and the Australian settler colonialists did to the aboriginals or the settler colonialists did to the Africans in South Africa and Namibia to steal their land and resources.
Down with the Zionist Apartheid state!
For a red free Palestine from the river to the sea!
Endnotes:
[i] https://www.adl.org/resources/glossary-terms/palestinian-refugees
[ii] https://www.adl.org/resources/glossary-terms/allegation-israel-commits-acts-of-genocide
[iii] Salman Abu Sitta, the Palestinian Nakba 1948. London:
[iv] Jabotinsky Archives (Tel Aviv) 1/10-4K cited in Michael Palumbo, The Palestinian Catastrophe, p. 48.
[v] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/10/21/lydda-1948
[vi] https://www.timesofisrael.com/tantura-director-israelis-have-been-lied-to-for-years-about-alleged-1948-massacre
[vii] IBID
[viii] Ibid
[ix] Ibid
[x] Khalidi, W (1959): “Why Did the Palestinians Leave?” Middle East Forum, vol. XXXV, no. 7, pp. 22–24. Cited by Glazer (1980), p. 101.
[xi] https://www.paljourneys.org/en/timeline/highlight/14334/kafr-qasim-1956
[xii] https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200414-we-must-never-forget-israels-massacre-in-je