The History of Oppression of the Palestinian People. A Critical Account of the Myths of Zionism
By Yossi Schwartz, Internationalist Socialist League (Section of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency in Israel / Occupied Palestine), April 2019, www.thecommunists.net
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Contents
Part I
I. The Zionist Myths about the Jews
The Zionist Myth: Palestine belongs to “God’s chosen people”
The Patriarch Abraham
The Myth about Moses
King David
The People of the Second Temple
II. The Zionist Myth about the Palestinians
The UN Partition Plan in 1947
Genetic Evidence?
III. The Arabs Connection to Palestine
The Real History of Palestine
The Christians in Palestine
Palestine under the Moslems
The Crusaders
Palestine under the Ottomans
Part II
Zionism and British Imperialism
The 1929 Clashes
V. The Creation of Israel and the Expulsion of the Palestinians
The War of 1948
The Zionists Aim in the 1948 War
Stalinism supported Israel’s reactionary war in 1948
The Palestinian Refugees
The Jewish Refugees
VI. Israel as a Colonial Settler State and the Palestinians’ Resistance
The Military Regime
The War of 1956
The War of 1967
Why war?
Alone in the war?
The “Miracle”
The War of 1973
The PLO
The Left Fronts
Land Day
The First Intifada
The Oslo Agreement
The Wars in Lebanon
The Occupation of 1967
Gaza
Tables
Table 1. Share of Palestinian vs. Jewish land ownership as of April 1st, 1943
Table 2. Population Growth in Palestine, 1922-1946
Table 3. Statistics: Total Casualties, Arab-Israeli Conflict
Table 4. Palestinians killed in the Occupied Territories (including East Jerusalem)
Table 5. Israelis killed in the Occupied Territories (including East Jerusalem)
Table 6. Palestinians within the Green Line
Table 7. Israelis killed within the Green Line
Maps
Map 1. British Promises of Arab Independence (1915)
Map 2. Arab Countries Occupied by Britain and France after World War One
Map 3. Palestinian Loss of Land 1946 – Present
Introduction
This book is written from a Marxist revolutionary perspective. Its aim is to provide a systematical analysis of the history of Palestine, a name given by the Greek and the Romans to the country that was known until then as Canaan.
Canaan was located in the Levant region of present-day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Israel. It was also known as Phoenicia. The origin of the name `Canaan’ is not clear. According to the Bible, the land was named after a man called Canaan, the grandson of Noah (Genesis 10). The name Canaan first appears in documents from the 15th century B.C. and was variously written: Akkadian: Kinani (m), Kinaui, etc.; Egyptian: Knnw and Pknn; Ugaritic: Knaany (“a Canaanite”); Phoenician and Hebrew: Knaan. Most scholars connect the name with the Hurrian term kinau meaning (reddish) purple. Support for this is found in the similarity between the Greek Φοινιξ meaning reddish purple and Φοινίκη meaning Phoenicia. Those who derive the name from the Semitic root kn’ consider it either a name for the conchiferous snail which yielded purple dye, or a term for the western clans. [1]
The name Palestine refers to the Philistines who ruled Canaan in different periods between the twelfth century B.C. and the eighth century B.C.
While the writer of this booklet recognizes the right of the oppressed Palestinian people to their land stolen by the Zionists, the right of the return of the Palestinian refugees, and opposes the right of self-determination for the Zionist settler colonialists, he advocates a socialist solution that will enable the Palestinians and the Israeli Jews to live peacefully as equals in the same workers state and as a part of the socialist federation of the Middle East, the most democratic form of states. [2]
History has shown that the right of self-determination for the Zionists excludes the right of self-determination for the oppressed Palestinians even in a mini state. The same was true for South Africa. Revisionists of Marxism claim that Marxists support the self determination of all nations. They ignore the fact that Marx did not support the right of self-determination for the South in the American civil war, Trotsky’s position on South Africa where he supported a Black workers state and not a state for the European colonialist settlers and Lenin advocated the right of self-determination only for oppressed nations. [3]
Lenin wrote: ”Imperialism means the progressively mounting oppression of the nations of the world by a handful of Great Powers; it means a period of wars between the latter to extend and consolidate the oppression of nations; it means a period in which the masses of the people are deceived by hypocritical social-patriots, i.e., individuals who, under the pretext of the “freedom of nations”, “the right of nations to self-determination”, and “defense of the fatherland”, justify and defend the oppression of the majority of the world’s nations by the Great Powers.” [4]
[1] “Canaan, Land of.” Encyclopaedia Judaica. Encyclopedia.com. (March 20, 2019). https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/canaan-land
[2] We refer readers to the numerous publications on the Palestinian liberation struggle by the author of these lines as well as by the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT), of which he is a leading member. See e.g. the program of the Palestinian RCIT section which can be read here: http://www.the-isleague.com/our-platform/ and https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/summary-of-isl-program/; see also Yossi Schwartz: Israel’s War of 1948 and the Degeneration of the Fourth International, http://the-isleague.com/1948-war-5-2013/ and https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/israel-s-war-of-1948/; Yossi Schwartz: Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism 16 November 2018, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/anti-semitism-and-anti-zionism/; Yossi Schwartz: The Origins of the Jews, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/origins-of-jews/; Michael Pröbsting: On some Questions of the Zionist Oppression and the Permanent Revolution in Palestine, http://the-isleague.com/zionist-oppression-and-permanent-revolution/ and https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/permanent-revolution-in-palestine/; We refer reader for more information on the ISL’s and the RCIT’s stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people to our websites http://www.the-isleague.com and https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/.
[3] On Lenin’s theory of imperialism and the national question see e.g. the RCIT’s book by Michael Pröbsting: The Great Robbery of the South. Continuity and Changes in the Super-Exploitation of the Semi-Colonial World by Monopoly Capital. Consequences for the Marxist Theory of Imperialism, RCIT Books, Vienna 2013, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/great-robbery-of-the-south/
[4] V.I.Lenin: The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1915), https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/oct/16.htm
I. The Zionist Myths about the Jews
From this perspective it is important to deal with many myths and even lies that have been promoted by the Zionists in order to justify their colonialist project. In the process of the colonization of this country by the Zionists many lives were lost of Arabs and of Jews for a project that is irrational and it is not difficult to see that it has entered its decaying stage. It is still very strong militarily but it is rotting from within.
The Zionist Myth: Palestine belongs to “God’s chosen people”
A common Zionist claim is that Jews have lived in the biblical lands for three to four thousand years beginning with Abraham and that these lands belong to God’s chosen people: the Jews whose God promised them this land in the covenant with Abraham.
Thus the Israeli Embassy in Ghana in 2018 day of Israel independence stated:
“70 years shows only the number of years for the re-establishment of the State of Israel after many years of exile. It is well known that Israel is a very ancient nation and this fact has been well documented over 3 and half thousand years. Our independence goes over 3000 years ago and continued with some interruption for 1000 years. In the year 135 AD, we lost our independent completely, but even during the long diaspora, there were always Jewish communities living in the land of Israel. Moreover, the people of Israel never forgot their homeland and always prayed to return to Jerusalem.”
It was said that secular Zionists do not believe in God but believe that god promised them this land. Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, loved the book of Joshua of the bible. The book of Joshua has been popular, particularly among nationalist readers who found justification in its unified army, settlement project, and elimination of native inhabitants. These themes resonated all the more among nationalist settlers like the Boers and the Zionists. Because the Zionists need the bible to justify their crimes it is impossible to separate between the state and the Rabbinates.
In the Center for Israel Studies we find: “From the earliest days of the Bible—from the creation story itself—to the lives of most Jews today, the Land of Israel has been an important part of the Jewish story. The first verse of the Torah, “In the beginning G-d created the heavens and the land,” was understood by the rabbis as indicating G-d’s sovereignty over the world and over all its lands. According to this interpretation, the biblical text implied that the Land of Israel was given to the Jewish people.” [1]
This is a strange argument coming from people who claim that the intellectual roots of Zionism are anchored in the Jewish Haskalah, which from Hebrew translates as the “Enlightenment of the mind.” Fundamentally, so it was claimed, Zionism advocated adopting enlightenment values, pressing for more secular education. [2]
The argument that god promised the Jews this land has nothing to do with the Enlightenment. The American and French Revolutions were inspired by Enlightenment ideals. Zionism as a Jewish political nationalist and colonialist movement was born after the revolutionary period of the bourgeoisie. It was born at the time of the scramble for Africa (1881-1914) when the different imperialist states occupied the last remaining colonies and would begin the power struggle leading to WWI.
The Zionists slogan: “A land without people for people without a land” was influenced by the white spots doctrine of the imperialists. According to this doctrine a country that is not ruled by an imperialist state is a white spot on the map waiting to be discovered and ruled by an imperialist state that would bring progress to the native people. In 1885, two years before the first Zionist congress, European imperialist leaders met at the infamous Berlin Conference to divide Africa and arbitrarily draw up borders that exist to this day.
Today anyone who dares to call the Zionists colonialists and racists is going to face the accusation of being Anti-Semite. Not always it was so. The UN General Assembly passed in 1975 a resolution condemning Zionism as racism based on the UN’s own definition of racial discrimination, adopted in 1965. According to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, racial discrimination is “any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.” As a definition of racism and racial discrimination, this statement is correct and characterizes Zionism. However this resolution was reversed in 1991 because of the neo-liberal atmosphere of that time that since then became even uglier with a right-wing populists atmosphere in many countries.
The founders of the Zionist movement did not try to hide that they were colonialists. Herzl called the financial trust he founded the “Jewish Colonial Trust. “At the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in August 1897, the idea of a central fund to support the development of a Jewish home in Palestine was raised by Max Bodenheimer, a lawyer from Cologne, Germany. In May 1898, an initial committee, consisting of Bodenheimer, David Wolffsohn of Lithuania and Dr. Rudolph Schauer of Germany, was organized to lay the foundation for the new enterprise. The committee established that the new bank’s purpose would be the economic development and strengthening of Jewish colonies in Palestine, the purchase of land for new settlements on a legally recognized basis, the development of trade and industry in the colonies, the loaning of money for the purposes of colonization, and the establishment of savings-banks in the colonies.” [3]
It is well known that Herzl wrote: “If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” [4]
Herzl saw himself and his movement as part of the European plans for dismantling the Ottoman Empire.
Rodinson was the first to point out the political nature of Zionism as settler colonialists acting within the imperialists’ framework:
“The [Zionist] perspective was inevitably placed within the framework of the European assault on the Ottoman Empire, this “sick man” whose complete dismemberment was postponed by the rivalries of the great powers but who, in the meantime, was subjected to all kinds of interference, pressures, and threats. An imperialist setting if there ever was one.” [5]
The Zionist movement was not only ready to serve European imperialism, it was born as a racist and Anti-Semite. Max Nordau, one of founders of the Zionist movement at the First Zionist Congress stated in his opening address, “The majority of Jews are a race of accursed beggars.” [6] At the 1898 Second Zionist Congress, Nordau said: “We must think once again of creating a Jewry of muscles”. He envisioned a Jewish race that was physically strong, able to defend itself against anti-Semitism and be able to make the Zionist goal of a Jewish state become reality. [7]
As Herzl asserted Israel is a strategic asset to the other imperialists. This has been confirmed by many imperialist leaders. José María Aznar, the former Prime Minister of Spain, for example stated:
“Israel is not only part of the Western world, in spite of being located in the Middle East. It is an indispensable and vital part of our civilization. Put aside our historical common roots; put aside the moral obligations to give and support a State for the Jewish people; put aside the thousands of years that link the Jewish people with the land where they live today. Just consider the many benefits we, the rest of the West and the world, enjoy thanks to Israel. [8]
The main Zionist justification for the creation of Israel is the need to provide the Jews a shelter against Anti-Semitic persecution, and yet Israel has become a close friend of many extreme right anti-Semitic parties and regimes in Europe and other places who identify with the Zionist repression of the Palestinians. They love Israel and hate the Jews. Israel has become the symbol of reaction everywhere. This moral bankruptcy has been a feature of Zionism from the very beginning. Herzl wrote on the Anti-Semites that they are the best friends of the Zionists: The Zionist founder Theodor Herzl wrote: “It is essential that the suffering of Jews….becomes worse….this will assist in (the) realization of our plans….I have an excellent idea….I shall induce anti-Semites to liquidate Jewish wealth….The anti-Semites will assist us thereby in that they will strengthen the persecution and oppression of Jews. The anti-Semites shall be our best friends.” [9]
To appeal to the Jews to join the colonialist project the Zionist have claimed that the Jews are a world nation and adopted religious symbols. For example the Zionist blue and white flag is based on the Jewish Tallit (Praying Shawl). We find in the Jewish Virtual Library the following definition for the Jewish nation: “Judaism can be thought of as being simultaneously a religion, a nationality and a culture. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the 20th century, most of the European world agreed that Jews constituted a distinct nation. This concept of nation does not require that a nation have neither a territory nor a government, but rather, it identifies, as a nation any distinct group of people with a common language and culture. Only in the 19th century did it become common to assume that each nation should have its own distinct government; this is the political philosophy of nationalism. In fact, Jews had a remarkable degree of self-government until the 19th century. So long as Jews lived in their ghettos, they were allowed to collect their own taxes, run their own courts, and otherwise behave as citizens of a landless and distinctly second-class Jewish nation.” [10]
This definition is confusing Judaism, which is religion, with Israel that was a kingdom and a nation, Judea that was a kingdom and a nation, and the ancient Hebrews who believed in many gods.
According to this definition all the English speaking Christians are one nation. All the Muslims who speak Arabic are one nation. What they ignore is the fact that Jews around the world do not speak the same language nor do they have the same culture. Not only this, but many Jews are not religious. Thus, this is a fake definition of nations. As a matter of fact this was the definition of nations by the Vatican in the Middle Age.
The Patriarch Abraham
The Zionists argue that their right to Palestine is rooted in the fact they have lived in Palestine for the last 3500- 4000 years from the days of the Patriarch Abraham. This claim raises some questions: Was such a person alive? If he lived what is the origin of his name? Why would he leave his country and settle in Palestine? Was he a Jew?
The bible tells us that originally Abraham was named Abram. Such a name indicates that he was a descendant of Ram. The native province of Ab Ram was called Aram, which means “land of Ram” and was inhabited by the Aramaeans. The bible says: ”A wandering Aramean was my father” (Deuteronomy 5). The name Hebrews related to Eber, a synonym for the earliest Hebrews (Genesis 10:21): ”Unto Shem also, the father of all the children of Eber, the brother of Japheth the elder, even to him were children born.” It related to the wider group of Hebrew peoples including Abraham. Eber was an ancient city in Mesopotamia.
If Abraham was a real person according to the biblical story he lived around 2000 B.C. (Genesis Chapters 11 through 25.) He lived in Ur. Ur was a city-state in Sumer, a part of the Fertile Crescent located from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Iraq to the Nile in Egypt. According to Genesis 11:31 the patriarch’s father, Terah, took his son (who was then called Abram) and his family out of a city called Ur of the Chaldeans.
There is a problem with this account. Archaeologists discovered that the Chaldeans were a tribe that didn’t exist until somewhere around the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., nearly 1,500 years after Abraham is believed to have lived.
It is possible that those priests who wrote the Bible were confused and Abraham came from the Ur of Haran, which was some 500 miles north of the Sumerian Ur. At that time the Amorite tribes ruled Haran. From his name and his father’s name, Terah, and his brothers’ names, Nahor and Haran, scholars have concluded that Abraham’s family may have been Amorites, a Semitic tribe that began to migrate out of Mesopotamia around 2100 B.C. The Amorites’ migration destabilized Ur, which scholars estimate collapsed around 1900 B.C. [11] Thus if Abraham was a real person he was not a Jew nor Aramaean but an Amorite. This probably indicates that the Hebrews were Amorites who invaded Canaan 4000 years ago. The Amorites were a Semitic people who seem to have emerged from western Mesopotamia (modern day Syria). In Sumerian they were known as the Martu or the Tidnum (in the Ur III Period), in Akkadian by the name of Amurru, and in Egypt as Amar, all of which mean ‘Westerners’. They had a pantheon of gods with a chief deity named Amurru (also known as Belu Sadi – ‘Lord of the Mountains’ whose wife, Belit-Seri was ‘Lady of the Desert’. [12]
The historian Kriwaczek wrote: “Terah’s family was not Sumerian. They have long been identified with the very people, the Amurru or Amorites, whom Mesopotamian tradition blamed for Ur’s downfall. William Hallo, Professor of Assyriology at Yale University, confirms that `growing linguistic evidence based chiefly on the recorded personal names of persons identified as Amorites…shows that the new group spoke a variety of Semitic ancestral to later Hebrew, Aramaic and Phoenician.” [13]
According to Finkelstein and Silberman, the first Israelites dwelt in the country as early as around 1200 BC. At the beginning of the Iron Age they were new settlers in the hill country who had abandoned their former nomadic lifestyle, relinquished most of the animals, and moved to permanent agriculture. But where did these new settlers come from? According to Finkelstein and Silberman, they were Canaanites who lived in the area and were previously nomads. [14]
Finkelstein and Silberman could be right but there is a real possibility that the ancient Israelites were part of the Amorites invasion of Canaan. William Dever, Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona, has investigated the archeology of the ancient Near East for more than 30 years and wrote many books on the subject. In an interview he stated: “One of the first efforts of biblical archeology in the last century was to prove the historicity of the patriarchs, to locate them in a particular period in the archeological history. Today I think most archeologists would argue that there is no direct archeological proof that Abraham, for instance, ever lived. We do know a lot about pastoral nomads, we know about the Amorites’ migrations from Mesopotamia to Canaan, and it’s possible to see in that an Abraham-like figure somewhere around 1800 B.C.E. But there’s no direct connection.” [15]
In an article in Haaretz we find: “In the Marriage of Martu, a Sumerian creation legend that took place in the distant past even in biblical times, in which the blushing bride weds an Amorite (“martu” in Sumerian), the stereotype is personified: “The Amorite he is dressed in sheep skins: he lives in tents in wind and rain; He doesn’t offer sacrifices. Armed vagabond in the steppes, he digs up truffles and is restless. He eats raw meat. Lives without a home; And when he dies, he is not buried according to proper rituals.” Over 4,000 years ago, mysterious herders who would become steeped in lore brought their flocks down from the mountains of Iran and western Syria into southern Mesopotamia. Sweeping on eastward into the Levant, they transformed the social landscape as they spread, destroying old power structures and building new dynasties. It is little surprise that the ancients would view incoming waves of Amorite shepherds as barbaric, inhuman raiders who eat “raw meat”. Whatever they ate, these Amorites spreading and simply taking whatever lands they needed to herd their flocks would have been among the forefathers of the Babylonians and Assyrians in the east, and the Canaanites in the west. And hence the Jews, probably.” [16]
If there was such an Amorite person could he be a Jew who believed in one god and the Jewish Torah? The belief in gods is a projection of the existence socio-political order on earth. Monotheism could not exist before a strong empire. The Sumerian religion was polytheistic in nature, and the Sumerians worshipped a great number of deities. These deities were anthropomorphic beings, and were meant to represent the natural forces of the world. It has been estimated that the deities in Sumerian pantheon numbered in the hundreds or even in the thousands. Nevertheless, some gods and goddesses feature more significantly in the religion of Sumer, and thus may be considered to be the main deities of the Sumerian pantheon. These were Anu, the god of the sky; Enlil, the god of the storms and Enki, the god who created the human being. [17]
The first evidence of monotheism emerges from Egypt in the 14th century BC (1353-1336 BC) during the reign of Akhenaten. The king was known to have worshiped Aten, the sun disk god. [18]
Thus even if such a person as Abraham existed it is impossible that he believed in one god. Furthermore according to the bible the Jewish Torah was given to the Israelites in the time of Moses who lived according to the Bible hundreds of years after Abraham.
In any case according to the bible when Abraham arrived to Canaan it was inhabited by Canaanite clans not an empty land waiting for Abraham and his family to settle in. We find in the bible that when Abraham arrived to Canaan it was inhabited by “the sons of Ham were Kush, Mizraim, Put and Canaan. Canaan became the father of Sidon his firstborn, and Heth, and the Jebusites, the Amorites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, the Arkites, the Sinites, the Arvadites, the Zemarites, and the Hamathites. Afterward the families of the Canaanites spread abroad. And the territory of the Canaanites extended from Sidon, in the direction of Gerar, as far as Gaza, and in the direction of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim, as far as Lasha” (Gen. 10:6, 15-19). Later on we are told by the bible that god told Abraham that although his descendants will inherit the land, this will have to wait four generations because (Gen. 15:16): “The sin of the Amorite is not yet complete”. Thus most probably the first known people of Canaan according to the Jewish bible were the Amorites and not Jews.
The Myth about Moses
A supporter of Zionism may say that may be Abraham was a Hebrew and an Amorite and not a Jew but Moses was a Jew and thus our history in this country is of 3500 years.
The ‘small’ problem with this argument is that the story of the Exodus and of the occupation of Canaan which included according to the bible the killing of the Canaanite is a myth.
It is likely a myth taken from the Babylonians myth Enuma Elish of the struggle of the warrior god Marduk with the sea Dragon Tiamat. [19] This myth is related also to the Jewish myth of the creation. The Epic of Creation of the Babylon begins after the killing of the Dragon Marduk divides her body into two halves. Out of one he makes a dome-shaped covering for the heavens and from the other half for Tiamat. The Hebrew story of the Creation opens with existing dark, turbulent, watery abyss named tehom (Gen. 1:2), a Hebrew word corresponding to the Babylonian Tiamat. He then divides it into two portions, making of the one the upper, and of the other the lower ocean. To keep the upper waters in their place, he creates a domelike support, rakia. [20]
As to the story of the occupation of Canaan by Joshua, first of all we should ask when these events took place according to the bible. We find in the bible Kings 1 6:1 “And it came to pass in the 480th year after the children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the 4th year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month Zif, which [is] the second month, that he began to build the house of the LORD.” Solomon’s 4th Year was 966 B.C. Go back 480 Years and this is 1445 B.C.
According to the bible the Hebrews, led by Moses and his general Joshua, were the enemy of the Canaanites and were ordered to destroy all the Canaanites. “One of the difficult problems posed by events recorded in the Book of Joshua in the Old Testament concerns the destruction of the Canaanites. When the children of Israel entered the Promised Land they destroyed the Canaanites as ordered by the Lord. The Bible tells what happened when the Israelites conquered Jericho: And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, ox and sheep and donkey, with the edge of the sword (Joshua 6:21).” [21]
Luckily enough for the Canaanites the story of the exodus and the occupation of Canaan by Joshua is another myth. In 1445 BC, the alleged time of the occupation of Canaan by Joshua, Canaan was an Egyptian colony with a strong army and the bible does not mention any battle with the Egyptian army in Canaan. In 1456 BCE, Pharaoh Thutmoses III won a decisive battle against a coalition of Canaanite rulers at Megiddo. The great Pharaoh recorded his triumph in Egypt: “Inasmuch as every prince of every northern land is shut up within it, the capture of Megiddo is the capture of a thousand towns!” [22] For three centuries, Egyptians ruled the land of Canaan. The Egyptians built fortresses, mansions, and agricultural estates from Gaza to Galilee, taking Canaan’s finest products—copper from Dead Sea mines, cedar from Lebanon, olive oil and wine from the Mediterranean coast, along with untold numbers of slaves and concubines and sending them overland and across the Mediterranean and Red Seas to Egypt to please the ruling class. [23]
There is no archaeological or historical evidence in support for the biblical story of slaves leaving Egypt, and certainly no extra-biblical evidence, in Egyptian inscriptions. Yet the Egyptian did mention the name Moses. The Egyptians told the story of Moses, but in their version, he wasn’t a miracle-working hero with God-given powers. In the version passed down by the Egyptian historian Manetho, Moses is a brutal and violent monster and he isn’t even Jewish. Moses, according to Manetho, was an Egyptian priest named Osarsiph who tried to take over Egypt. The pharaoh had quarantined everyone with leprosy into a city called Avaris, and Osarsiph used them to stage a revolt. He made himself the ruler of the lepers, changed his name to Moses, and turned them against the pharaoh. Moses and his army of lepers created the Jewish laws purely out of spite for the Egyptians. They deliberately made their laws the exact of opposite of everything the Egyptians believed. They sacrificed bulls, for example, purely because the Egyptians worshiped one.
Moses and his leper colony formed an alliance with the people living in Jerusalem. He built up an army of 200,000 people, and then invaded Egypt. They conquered Ethiopia first, where they reigned as brutal despots. According to the Egyptians, Moses and his people “abstained from no sort of wickedness or barbarity.” Eventually – after about 13 years – Amenophis known also as Amenhotep II (1427-1392 B.C.) managed to get a big enough army together to chase Moses out of Egypt. He chased him into Syria, where Moses and his people settled in Jerusalem. [24]
The Roman Historian Tacitus had another version like Manetho, his story begins with Egypt being plagued by leprosy, which he says was spread through pork. Moses and the other lepers were expelled from the country altogether and sent out into the wilderness. In the wilderness, Moses ordered his people to turn against god and man, telling them that “both had deserted them”. Once they made it to Canaan, Moses introduced a new religion – not because he believed in it, according to Tacitus, but because he believed it would “secure the allegiance of his people”. [25]
He introduced the kosher diet because eating pork had given them leprosy. He introduced fasting as a way to commemorate their journey through the wilderness. He had them keep the seventh day holy to commemorate their journey through the desert – which, in this version, didn’t take forty years. It took seven days. [26]
King David
At this point the Zionist may say: “well even if the story of Moses is a myth King David existed and therefore the history of the Jewish nation in this country goes back 3000 years”.
The ancient nations appeared in history at a stage when federations of tribes unify and create a political center usually in the form of a king. Thus the Hebrew Canaanites clans became nations with the construction of the kingdoms Judea and Israel. This happened around 1000 BC. This we can learn from the Jewish bible that tells us that each tribe was allotted an individual territory to settle. During this period of settlement, and the period of the Judges, there was no predetermined pattern of leadership among the tribes though various crises forced the tribes into joint defense against enemies.
Shiloh served as a center for all the tribes under the priestly family of Eli. Under the impact of military pressures, the Israelites felt compelled to turn to Samuel with the request that he will establish a monarchy, and Saul was crowned to rule over all the tribes of Israel. Thus the nation of Israel began according to this account with King Saul (1021–1000 B.C). However we have no evidence that King Saul existed. According to the bible he was killed by the Philistines in Gilboa and his body was hanged on the walls of Beth Shan. The only problem with this story is that Beth Shan was never a Philistine city.
“Unfortunately, due in part to later Roman and Byzantine construction at the base of the mound, excavators have not yet revealed any portion of the Beth Shean city wall from the 11th century B.C.E., when the Biblical story about King Saul’s death most likely occurred. And although the city was certainly occupied at this time, there is no evidence of a Philistine presence at the site then.” [27]
Thus indeed there is evidence that there was a city state rule by King David. It was found in 1993 in Tel Dan. The broken and fragmentary inscription commemorates the victory of an Aramean king over his two southern neighbors: the “king of Israel” and the “king of the House of David.” In the carefully incised text written in neat Aramaic characters, the Aramean king boasts that he, under the divine guidance of the god Hadad, vanquished several thousand Israelite and Judahite horsemen and charioteers before personally dispatching both of his royal opponents. The inscription does not mention the names of the specific kings involved in this encounter, but most scholars believe the stela recounts a campaign of Hazael of Damascus in which he defeated both Jehoram of Israel and Ahaziah of Judah. [28]
Thus there were two Hebrew nations in Canaan but were they Jewish? The answer is no. “Jehoram was King of Israel (852-842 B.C.); son of Ahab and Jezebel; brother and successor of Ahaziah. Like his predecessors, Jehoram worshiped Baal.” [29]
The kingdom of David could not be very large as the Philistines occupied the coastal strip between the Mediterranean and the land of Canaan. Their land was known as Philistia, a reference to the land of the Five Lords of the Philistines in the south-western Levant. Today, these areas occupy Israel, Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. The Philistines settled on the southern coast of Palestine in the 12th century BC, about the alleged time of the arrival of Joshua who replaced Moses to Canaan. According to biblical tradition (Deuteronomy 2:23; Jeremiah 47:4), the Philistines came from Caphtor (possibly Crete). The first records of the Philistines are inscriptions and reliefs in the mortuary temple of Ramses III at Madinat Habu, where they appear under the name prst. According to the Hebrew Bible, the Philistines were in a continuous struggle with the Israelites, Canaanites and Egyptians surrounding them. Egyptian records from the 12th-13th centuries B.C. mention the Philistines in connection with the Sea Peoples. Due to their similar maritime history, their association with each other was strong. The Sea Peoples were a confederacy of naval raiders who were assumed to have moved in the eastern Mediterranean areas during the Bronze Age. It has been theorized that the Sea Peoples were originally Etruscan, Italian, Mycenaen or Minoan. As a group, they primarily focused their efforts on attacking Egypt during 1200-900 BCE. Known for their innovative use of iron, the Philistines used this superior material to bronze, which was used by the Israelites for weaponry and more. This allowed the Philistines to be invincible on the battlefield. In the 8th-7th century B.C., starting with Tilgath-Pileser III, the Assyrians rule in Philistia. In 604 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the Philistine cities. Following the occupation of Judea, the Romans replaced the name of the country that in the past was called Canaan and called her Palestine after the Philistines who ruled at least part of the country until the Assyrian occupation. The intention of the Romans was to erase the name of Judea from history.
The Philistines were partly defeated by King David (10th century) but they regained their independence and often engaged in border battles with Judea and Israel. We know very little of the Philistine religion; the Philistine gods mentioned in biblical and other sources such as Dagan, Ashteroth, Astarte, and Beelzebub have Semitic names and were probably borrowed from the conquered Canaanites. This probably indicates that they were intermingled with the Canaanite. The God El was a name the ancient Hebrews used for god and was the father of Dagon. During the Assyrian occupation of Canaan the Philistines lost their kingdom and were absorbed into the other Canaanite clans.
The Bible book of Judges Chapter 10 says:”Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord. They served the Baals and the Ashtoreths, and the gods of Aram, the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the Ammonites and the gods of the Philistines. And because the Israelites forsook the Lord and no longer served him, he became angry with them. He sold them into the hands of the Philistines and the Ammonites of Ashdod, Akron and Ashkelon.” [30]
According to the bible and other sources like Assyrian there were two Hebrew kingdoms, Israel and Judea. They were a class society, the priests, were the upper class, the political ruler was the king and his court while the rest of the people were peasants, artisans, and slaves. Slaves of the establishment institutions of temple and palace were prisoners of war (Num 31:25-47; Josh 9:23), and they were used to build projects (1 Kings 9:21).
There was a kind of semi-slavery where a group of people owed a certain amount of labor, but otherwise lived as free people. This seems to have been what happened to the Gibeonites (Josh 9:23). Debt was the main factor in transforming a peasant farmer or artisan into a slave (Ex 22:2; 2 Kings 4:1) – though poverty that did not involve debt to the new master might also cause people to sell themselves as slaves (Lev 25:39).
In theory such slaves in Israel returned to free status at jubilee, however they could choose to remain in the household of the master (Ex 21:5-6; Dt 15:16-17). In practice as Jer 34:8 clearly shows this by no means always happened. Though the king and people agreed to release their slaves nevertheless they reneged on their promise.
According to the Bible, there was an almost constant state of war between the two kingdoms, with no clear outcome (1 Kings 14:30; 15:6,16). The biblical account does not correlate with the archaeological record, which shows that Israel had a far larger population than early Judah. It is infeasible that Judah could have held the Israelites in subjugation or that they could fight a protracted civil war against the northern kingdom. Israel was, for a short period, a minor regional power, while Judah was a more impoverished rural community.
The Kingdom of Israel, especially under King Ahab (869-850 B.C.), joined some Syrian states to stop temporarily the advance of the Assyrians, who had consolidated their kingdom to the northeast. But the power of Israel declined after Ahab and by the end of the ninth century the kingdom of Israel was forced to pay tribute to powerful Assyria. By 722 BC the Israeli kingdom was destroyed by the Assyrians and the population deported and disappeared as a nation. These people merged with neighboring peoples and gradually lost their identity. Thus Israel existed as a nation around 350 years, Judah was destroyed by the Babylonians in 598-582 BC and the upper class was taken to Babylon. Judea existed as a nation for around 500 years.
While these were two nations the question is whether the population of these kingdoms was Jews in the sense of worship of only Jehovah, the Canaanite god of metal that became the Jewish God. Israel’s religion evolved first through animism. After animism came polytheism, the belief in many gods. Polytheism was then followed by Totemism, “the belief that the members of a clan or tribe are related to some group of plants or animals” as descendants. Ancestor worship followed Totemism, and developed into belief in a local tribal deity…which finally evolved into monotheism. The Hebrew Bible provides ample evidence that many Israelites believed in the existence of multiple deities. This is the case for polytheistic Israelites whom biblical prophets criticize for worshipping other gods; but even some biblical texts are evidence of polytheistic. The Hebrew Bible refers to many heavenly creatures, calling them “gods” (Gen 6:2; Ps 29:1, Ps 82:6, Ps 86:8, Ps 89:7; Job 1:6).
The People of the Second Temple
The Zionist may say that even if these kingdoms were not Jewish, the people of the second temple beginning with Ezra and Nehemiah were Jews and thus the history of the Jewish nation in this country is of 2500 years.
In the book of Ezra we find: ”After these things had been done, the leaders came to me and said, “The people of Israel, including the priests and the Levites, have not kept themselves separate from the neighboring peoples with their detestable practices, like those of the Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians and Amorites. 2 They have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and their sons, and have mingled the holy race with the peoples around them. And the leaders and officials have led the way in this unfaithfulness.” (Ezra 9)
As to the language, “The vast majority of the Hebrew Bible (Tanach) is written in Hebrew”. (Some of the last books of the Bible, Daniel and Ezra, contain significant chunks of Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Jewish people during their Babylonian exile.) [31]
But since then the people of Judea were Jews will say the Zionist. The bible tells us that king Josiah (seventh century B.C.) “removed the Asherah pole from the Lord’s Temple. He took the Asherah pole outside the city to the Kidron Valley and burned it there. Then he beat the burned pieces into dust and scattered the dust over the graves of the common people. Then King Josiah broke down the houses of the male prostitutes who were in the Lord’s Temple. Women also used these houses and made little tent covers to honor the false goddess Asherah. At that time the priests did not bring the sacrifices to Jerusalem and offer them on the Lord’s altar in the Temple. The priests lived in cities all over Judah. They burned incense and offered sacrifices at the high places in those cities” (2 Kings 23:6-9)
Thus will say the Zionist there was a Jewish nation at least from the seventh century B.C.
Is this true? We find in Psalm 95: “For y-h-v-h is a great god and a greater king than all (other) gods…. He is our god.” This psalm lists things that y-h-v-h did for the Israelites. Psalm 96: “Y-h-v-h is great and very praiseworthy. He is more awesome than other gods. For (while) the gods of the nations are gods, y-h-v-h made the heaven.” Psalm 97: “All gods bow to him…. You are exalted above all gods.” This surely a proof that the Jews believed in the existence of many gods.
Psalm songs were written by different people and probably the last ones were written in the first century BC. Psalm 22 says: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so v far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest”. It seems that this is reference to the crucifixion of Jesus.
The Zionist may say but from the first century when the Jews were exiled they were Jews. Possibly but in the first century the Jews ceased being an ancient nation and became religious communities.
[1] The Center for Israel Education: The Place of Israel in Jewish Tradition for Israel Education, https://www.theicenter.org/aleph-bet/place-israel-jewish-tradition
[2] Nadia Marques de Carvalho: The Haskalah and the Emergence of Zionism, University of Oxford https://www.academia.edu/6342169/The_Haskalah_and_the_Emergence_of_Zionism
[3] Center for Israel Education: Jewish Colonial Trust Is Incorporated in London, https://israeled.org/jewish-colonial-trust/
[4] Theodor Herzl: The Jewish State, http://zionism-israel.com/js/Jewish_State_7.html
[5] With his 1967 article ‘Israël, fait colonial’ (Israel, a colonial fact), Rodinson is commonly credited as the first contemporary ‘Western’ scholar to have re-placed Zionism/Israel within its colonial, and more specifically settler colonial, context. The original French article first appeared in a special issue on the ‘Israeli-Arab conflict’ of Les Temps Modernes in June 1967. In 1973, it was published in English in book form under the title Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? All citations are from the 1973 English edition.
[6] Max Simon Nordau and Bentzion Netanyahu. “Address at the Second Congress,” Max Nordau to His People: A Summons and a Challenge. New York: Published for Nordau Zionist society by Scopus publishing company, inc., 1941. 73.
[7] Joshua Umland Max Nordau and the Making of Racial Zionism By History and Jewish Studies Departmental Undergraduate Honors Thesis University of Colorado at Boulder April 5, 2013
[8] José María Aznar, Former Prime Minister of Spain (1996-2004). Israel: A Vital Asset Of The West
[9] https://www.tikkun.org/newsite/jews-against-zionism-an-intro-to-their-perspective
[10] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/are-jews-a-nation-or-a-religion
[11] Cynthia Astle Archaeological Evidence About the Biblical Story of Abraham 2018
[12] Joshua J. Mark: Amorites Ancient History Encyclopedia 28 April 2011, https://www.ancient.eu/amorite/
[13] Kriwaczek, P. Babylon. St. Martin’s Griffin,163-164 2012
[14] Finkelstein Israel and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, 2001
[15] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/archeology-hebrew-bible/
[16] Philippe Bohstrom: Peoples of the Bible: The Legend of the Amorites, Haaretz Feb 06, 2017 https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/.premium.MAGAZINE-the-legend-of-the-amorites-1.5493696
[17] The Sumerian Seven: The Top-Ranking Gods in the Sumerian Pantheon March, 2017, https://www.Ancient-Origins.Net/Human-Origins-Religions/Sumerian-Seven-Top-Ranking-Gods-Sumerian-Pantheon-007787
[18] Daily History Org.: How did Monotheism Develop? https://dailyhistory.org/How_did_Monotheism_Develop%3F
[19] Robert Luyster: Myth And History In The Book Of Exodus
[20] Rev. A. E. Whatham: The Yahweh-Tehom Myth, The Biblical World, Vol. 36, No. 5 (Nov., 1910), pp. 290 and 329-333
[21] Don Stewart: Why Did God Order the Destruction of the Canaanites? https://www.blueletterbible.org/faq/don_stewart/don_stewart_1382.cfm
[22] Annals of Thutmoses III
[23] Roger Atwood: The Fiery End Of The Last Egyptian Colony
[24] Mark Oliver: 4 Completely Different Versions of the Story of Moses 2017, https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-famous-people/which-real-story-moses-was-he-criminal-philosopher-hero-or-atheist-008008
[25] Ibid
[26] Ibid
[27] https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-sites-places/biblical-archaeology-sites/beth-shean-in-the-bible-and-archaeology
[28] https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/artifacts-and-the-bible/the-tel-dan-inscription-the-first-historical-evidence-of-the-king-david-bible-story/
[29] Emil G. Hirsch, Bernhard Pick, Ira Maurice Price; Jehoram (Joram): http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/8564-jehoram-joram
[30] N.S. Gill: Understanding the Philistines: An Overview and Definition, https://www.thoughtco.com/the-philistines-117390
[31] https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/4064301/jewish/10-Facts-About-the-Hebrew-Language-Every-Jew-Should-Know.htm
II. The Zionist Myth about the Palestinians
At this point the Zionist may argues that the Palestinians do not have any national rights in this country because the Palestinians are not a nation, they never had a state and they came to this country after the arrival of the Zionist because they were attracted to the country that the Jews have developed.
Until the first Intifada, which began in 1987, denying that the Palestinians are a nation was a very common Zionist argument. It went like this: “It was only after the Jews re-inhabited their historic homeland of Judea and Samaria, that the myth of an Arab Palestinian nation was created and marketed worldwide. Jews come from Judea, not Palestinians. There is no language known as Palestinian, or any Palestinian culture distinct from that of all the Arabs in the area. There has never been a land known as Palestine governed by Palestinians. “Palestinians” are Arabs indistinguishable from Arabs throughout the Middle East. The great majority of Arabs in greater Palestine and Israel share the same culture, language and religion. Much of the Arab population in this area actually migrated into Israel and Judea and Samaria from the surrounding Arab countries in the past 100 years. The rebirth of Israel was accompanied by economic prosperity for the region. Arabs migrated to this area to find employment and enjoy the higher standard of living. In documents not more than hundred years, the area is described as a scarcely populated region. Jews by far were the majority in Jerusalem over the small Arab minority. Until the Oslo agreement the major source of income for Arab residents was employment in the Israeli sector. To this day, many Arabs try to migrate into Israel with various deceptions to become a citizen of Israel.” [1]
Similarly another Zionist wrote: “Historical and archeological records attest to the continuous presence of Jewish communities from Biblical times to the present. In short, although they were no longer its rulers, Jews never abandoned the land they occupied for thousands of years. Modern Arab residents of the area have a very different history, one that goes back hundreds, not thousands, of years”…[ ] It is clear that although “a small Arab population in Palestine…could trace its roots back for centuries,” scholars believe Arabs, primarily nomadic Bedouin tribes, came to the area in the 7th century. Most Arab migration occurred during the middle of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century, as workers were brought in by the Ottoman Turks and later by British rulers to serve absentee landlords and work on various infrastructure and agricultural projects.“ [2]
There are many mistakes and falsifications in these passages.
To begin with there is no one Arab culture. Arab culture can roughly be categorized into different areas of the Arab world. Arab and North African culture share certain cultural similarities, while the same goes for Arab culture in the Levant areas and the Arabian Peninsula region.
It does not take a genius to recognize that there is a unique Palestinian culture. Even Wikipedia is aware that “Palestinian culture consists of food, dance, legends, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, customs, and comprising the traditions (including oral traditions) of Palestinian culture. The folklorist revival among Palestinian intellectuals such as Nimr Sirhan, Musa Allush, Salim Mubayyid, and the emphasized pre-Islamic (and pre-Hebraic) cultural roots, re-constructing Palestinian identity with a focus on Canaanite and Jebusite cultures. Such efforts seem to have borne fruit as evidenced in the organization of celebrations like the Qabatiya Canaanite festival and the annual Music Festival of Yabus by the Palestinian Ministry of Culture.” [3]
Secondly let us recall how the Zionist defines a nation when it suits him: “This concept of nation does not require that a nation have neither a territory nor a government, but rather, it identifies, as a nation any distinct group of people with a common language and culture”. This is not a criterion to nationhood only another proof to the cynicism of the Zionists.
It is true that the Palestinians are a new nation. This nation was formed in the struggle of the Palestinians against the British imperialists and the Zionist colonialists from the 1920s onwards. It is true that when the first waves of Zionist settlers arrived to Palestine, the Palestinians saw themselves as Arabs and not a separate nation. However this fact does give the Zionists the right to steal their lands by using force?
Arab Nationalism began only in the 19th century at the time of the decline of Ottoman Empire. “As the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in 1914 this loyalty could no longer be taken for granted, for two reasons. The first was the growth of a nascent Arab nationalism that drew inspiration from 19th-century Western ideas. Some Arabs looked to the nationalist movements of the Slavic (and mostly Christian) minorities of the Ottoman Balkan territories, which had, by the end of 1912, all won their independence. This Arab nationalism was largely fostered by educated urban elites – intellectuals, civil servants and former or serving officers in the Ottoman Army – living in great Arab cities like Damascus and Baghdad. A number of secret societies were formed, although none of these succeeded in spreading their ideas to the wider Arab population before the outbreak of the First World War.” [4]
Does the fact that Arab nationalism began at the end of the 19th century gives anyone the right to conquer them on the ground that prior to the 19th century there were no Arab nationalist movements? The imperialist thought that it is permissible to conquer the Arabs and so have the Zionists.
The Zionists claim that they did not steal the lands but that they bought the lands in fair prices from the landlords. But who were these landlords? Here is what a Zionist wrote to justify the removal of the Palestinian peasants from the land they toiled for generations.
“Until the passage of the Turkish Land Registry Law in 1858, there were no official deeds to attest to a man’s legal title to a parcel of land; tradition alone had to suffice to establish such title— and usually it did. … The Palestinian peasant was indeed being dispossessed, but by his fellow-Arabs: the local sheikh and village elders, the Government tax-collector, the merchants and money-lenders; and, when he was a tenant-farmer (as was usually the case), by the absentee-owner. By the time the season’s crop had been distributed among all these, little if anything remained for him and his family, and new debts generally had to be incurred to pay off the old.” [5] From these characters they bought the lands and evicted the peasants. This led to bloody conflicts from 1920 onwards between the Palestinians and the Zionist settler colonialists.
In spite of the fact that the Zionist bought lands by 1948 the Zionists owned less than 6% of the lands of Palestine.
Table 1. Share of Palestinian vs. Jewish land ownership as of April 1st, 1943 [6]
Category of land Palestinians & others Jews Total
(Fiscal categories) Dunums (1000 sq. meters)
Urban 76,662 70,111 146,773
Citrus 145,572 141,188 286,760
Bananas 2,300 1,430 3,730
Rural built-on area 36,851 42,330 79,181
Plantation 1,079,788 95,514 1,175,302
Cereal land (taxable) 5,503,183 814,102 6,317,285
Cereal land (not taxable) 900,294 51,049 951,343
Uncultivable 16,925,805 298,523 17,224.328
Total area: 24,670,455 1,514,247 26,184,702
Percentage 94.22% 5.8% 100%
Roads, railways, rivers,
and lakes 135,803
Total Area including roads,
railways, etc. 26,320,505
The Zionists took the rest of the lands by force in 1947-48 and after 1967 and today they rule the whole of Palestine.
The Zionist claim that Palestine was unpopulated is also a lie.
If the argument of the Zionist was correct they could show an unusual growth of Arab population from 1922 to 1948 as result of migration to Palestine. The population of Palestine increase between 1922 and 1939, from 750,000 and 1,500,000. An important reason for the growth was Jewish migration: 35,000 immigrants between 1919 and 1923, 82,000 (1924-31) and 217,000 (1932-38).
Table 2. Population Growth in Palestine, 1922-1946 [7]
Year Arabs Jews Total
1922 (Census) 668,238 83,790 752,048
1931(Census) 858,708 174,606 1,033,314
1939 (Estimate) 1,056,241 445,457 1,502,698
1946(Estimate) 1,200,000 600,000 1,800,000
“No record of substantial Arab immigration was recorded in Palestine by the British government. According to all the reports of the period, Arab recorded” immigration to Palestine was minimal, casual, and unquantifiable it main source of growth was of natural causes (rate of births).” [8]
“Between 1933 and 1935, 150,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine, bringing the country’s Jewish population to 443,000 – or 29.6% of the total – from 1926 to 1932 the average number of immigrants per year was 7,201. It rose to 42,985 between 1933 and 1936, as direct result of Nazi persecution in Germany. In 1932, 9,000 German Jews entered Palestine, 30,000 in 1933, 40,000 in 1934 and 61,000 in 1935.”
Another Zionist lie is that the Zionists advance Palestinian economy and raised the level of living of the Palestinians.
“In the real history, the Zionists bought lands from landlords who lived in Lebanon and removed by force the fallahins who worked the lands for many generations. In the 1920s, the Histadrut launched a campaign to promote Jewish labor (Avodat Ivrit) and Jewish produce (Totzeret Haaretz), which was essentially a boycott of Arab labor and produce. David HaCohen, former managing director of Solel Boneh, described what this meant:
“I had to fight my friends on the issue of Jewish socialism to defend the fact that I would not accept Arabs in my trade union, the Histadrut; to defend preaching to housewives that they should not buy at Arab stores; to defend the fact that we stood guard at orchards to prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there … to pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes; to attack Jewish housewives in the markets and smash Arab eggs they had bought … to buy dozens of dunums [of land] from an Arab is permitted but to sell God forbid one Jewish dunum to an Arab is prohibited; to take Rothschild the incarnation of capitalism as a socialist and to name him the ‘benefactor’ — to do all that was not easy.” [9]
“The policy of dismissal of Palestinian Arab workers from firms and projects controlled by Jewish capital initiated violent clashes. In the four Jewish settlements of Malbis, Dairan, Wadi Hunain and Khadira, there were 6,214 Palestinian Arab workers in February 1935. After six months, this figure went down to 2,276, and in a year’s time, went down to 617 Palestinian Arab workers only. Attacks against Palestinian Arab workers also took place. On one occasion, for instance, the Jewish community forced a Palestinian Arab contractor and his workers to leave their work in the Brodski building in Haifa. Among those who were systematically losing their jobs were workers in orchards, cigarette factories, mason’s yards, construction, etc.” [10]
As to the claim that Arab economics gained from Zionist colonization “the fact is that Between 1930 and 1935, Palestinian Arab pearl industry exports fell from PL 11,532 to PL 3,777 a year. The number of Palestinian Arab soap factories in Haifa alone fell from 12 in 1929 to 4 in 1935. Their export value fell from PL 206,659 in 1930 to PL 79,311 in 1935.” [11]
“The second wave of 30,000 Zionist immigrants came between 1905 and 1914, many of whom were Labor Zionists who wanted A Jewish state. The perceived threat of displacement was widespread among Arabs. Starting around 1910, Arab newspapers railed against Jewish land acquisition. Among the peasantry, rumors spread alleging an Anglo-Jewish conspiracy to remove Muslims from Palestine. Palestinians say evictions destroyed their way of life, forcing them to move from rural Palestine to crowded cities in search of work.” [12] They were right as the Nakba proves.
The UN Partition Plan in 1947
Another false Zionist claim is that if the Arabs would had accepted the partition plan the Palestinians would have a state and there will not be any problem of the refugees.
It is true that the Arabs Rejected the partition and the Zionists said that they accept it. However in reality they never accepted a Palestinian state even on a portion of Palestine.
The inevitable outcome of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine was the Nakba, the “cleansing” of the existing Arab population from Palestine, because a Jewish majority was necessary to make a Jewish state viable. The Zionists using massacres drove out most of the Palestinians. How could the Palestinians accept this plan? The Jewish state was to cover 56 percent of the area of Mandate Palestine, with 498,000 Jewish and approximately 494,000 Arab Palestinians residents (51 percent Jews and 49 percent Arab Palestinians). At that time, Jews owned just 10 percent of the land of the proposed Jewish state. The proposed Arab state was to occupy 43 percent of mandate Palestine with a population of 725,000 Arab Palestinians and around 11,000 Jews. [13]
The Zionist consent to the partition was a political and diplomatic dishonest maneuver. First of all the Zionists knew that the Arabs would not accept this grossly unfair partition. Secondly Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, wrote to his son Amos on 5 October 1937 (about the first plan to divide the country):
”…Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure. But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession; it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English. What is in our actual possession is a small portion, less than what they [the Peel Commission] are proposing for a Jewish state. If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant. But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have, though of course much less than we merit and desire. … What we really want is not that the land remains whole and unified. What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish. A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me– if it were Arab. … we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant, and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs. We must expel Arabs and take their place. I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state, even if it is only in a part of the country, will enable us to carry out this task. Once a state is established, we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli Sea. Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements. Because of all the above, I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions. Both declare to me: A Jewish state must be established immediately, even if it is only in part of the country. The rest will follow in the course of time.” [14]
Third of all, just days before Israel will declare its independence, Golda Meir, then head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency traveled to Amman to meet with King Abdullah of Transjordan. This was the second meeting between the two, with the first occurring in early November 1947 at Naharayim on the banks of the Jordan River.
Abdullah shares the Zionist leadership’s fear of a Palestinian state led by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al Husayni emerging as a result of the UN Partition decision. In the November 1947 meeting with Golda Meir, he states his intention to annex the Arab parts of Palestine. Meir responds that the Zionist leadership will not oppose that plan if it means that there would be no clashes between Jewish and Jordanian forces. [15]
In addition the Zionists oppose the return of the Palestinian refugees on the ground it will destroy Israel as a Jewish state. This argument shows that the Zionists would expel the Palestinians who were supposed to live in Israel according to the partition plan to create a state with Jewish majority.
Genetic Evidence?
Finally in their attempt to prove that the European Zionist settlers are the same people as the ancient Jews they rely on the doubtful method of genetic studies.
A very doubtful method that easily leads to racist theories, however even these genetic studies do not prove the Zionist claims. What they prove according to the research is that the Jews from the Arab countries and Muslim Arabs have very similar Y chromosomes from the ancestors who lived in the region some thousands years ago. Geneticist Ariella Oppenheim of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who examined the Y chromosomes of 143 Arab Palestinians citizens of Israel and 119 Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews found that Arabs could trace their ancestry to men who had lived in the region for centuries or longer. Also Oppenheim’s team found that “Jews have mixed more with European populations, which makes sense because some of them lived in Europe during the last millennium.” [16] In other words Arab Muslims and Arab Jews have very similar Y chromosomes while the Ashkenazi Jews have a different one.
The Israeli biologists Falk wrote: “By the 1870s and 1880s the claims that Jews belonged to a race that could be discerned in terms of the natural sciences, were repeatedly brought up, and the traditional hatred against them became increasingly physical in character…., the Zionists-to-be stressed that Jews were not merely members of a cultural or a religious entity, but were an integral biological entity, even though they had been dispersed and had no country of their own. In other words, when the Zionists adopted the concept of Volk in terms of a nation-race, they claimed a different meaning to Jewishness than the centuries-long claims that the Jewish people were a distinct religious socio-cultural entity, rather than a biological entity.. The term anti-Semitism was coined in the 1870s by the German publicist Wilhelm Marr (1819–1904). Anti-Semitism conceived the socio-cultural traits of Jews to be a consequence of their biological essence. Jew-hatred became racism: hatred of the Semitic race, anti-Semitism; it endowed biological justification to socio-cultural discrimination.
The insistence on the biological identity of the Jews, and the search for the phylogenetic relation of present-day Jewish communities to each other and to the ancient people of the Land of Israel, always applying the most updated scientific techniques, became a common obsession among Israeli and non-Israeli researchers.
The Jewish-British physician-virologist and eugenicist Redcliffe Nathan Salaman (1874–1955) was one of the first to examine the implications of the young science of genetics to Jews. Already in 1911, in the first volume of the Journal of Genetics, he published a paper entitled “Heredity and the Jews” (Salaman, 1911). In this paper Salaman tried to examine the distinct biology of the Jews with the new tools of Mendelian inheritance, which provided the basis for modern hereditary theory:
Salaman put special emphasis on the claim that Jews comprised a coherent biological entity. He pointed out that “Ethnologists may be said to agree that the Jew is not racially pure, but on the other hand […] the Jews constitute a definable people in something more than a political sense, and that they possess though not a uniform, still a distinguishable type” (Salaman, 1911, p. 278). Since Jews vary with respect to color, cephalic index and stature as any other population, “Jews cannot be defined according to any of these standards. There is, however, one characteristic which rarely escapes attention, and that is the Jewish facial expression” (Salaman, 1911–1912, p. 190). A Jew, according to Salaman, may be recognized by his facial features. (…)
Many efforts were made to find “typical” Jewish blood-type combination, and phylogenetic kinships between geographically and culturally close and distinct Jewish communities. These studies were summarized in 1978 by Mourant and colleagues in The Genetics of the Jews (Mourant et al., 1978). Efforts to deduce from such studies converging blood group frequencies of the hypothetical ancient Jews were not successful, yet as a rule, they did not discourage the authors from claiming for the reality of communities of progeny of common ancestry (see, e.g., Muhsam, 1964)
These models of Darwinian evolution interpreted into vertical phylogenies are, of course, in agreement with the traditional Jewish historical lore of the contemporary Jews being the direct progeny of the historic residents of the Land of Israel.
Historian Shlomo Sand (2009) and many others brings evidence of extensive community-wide proselytizing events, from North-Africa all the way to Southern Russia.” [17]
Another example for the use of ethnic-biological racist argument is the right wing Begin-Sadat center for strategic studies that in order to deny the colonialist character of the Zionist settler state claims that the real colonialist settlers are the Palestinians, because the Israelites were the original people of Palestine. Alex Joffe wrote:
“The concept of “settler colonialism” has been applied with almost unique vehemence against Israel. But the fact that Jews are the indigenous population of the Southern Levant can be proved with ease. In contrast, historical and genealogical evidence shows Palestinians descend primarily from three primary groups: Muslim invaders, Arab immigrants, and local converts to Islam. The Muslim conquest of Byzantine Palestine in the 7th century CE is a textbook example of settler-colonialism, as is subsequent immigration, particularly during the 19th and 20th centuries under the Ottoman and British Empires. The application of the concept to Jews and Zionism by Palestinians is both ironic and unhelpful…..A wealth of evidence demonstrates that Jews are the indigenous population of the Southern Levant; historical and now genetic documentation places Jews there over 2,000 years ago, and there is indisputable evidence of continual residence of Jews in the region.” [18]
It is not difficult to grasp why this entire pseudo-intellectual argument is false. The indigenous population of the Southern Levant was Canaanites and not Jews. 2000 years ago the Jews were exiled by the Romans and ceased to be a nation. Since the 7th century for 1400 years the majority of the people of Palestine have been Arabs. The Zionists, who arrived to this country in the last 120 years and expelled most of the Arabs, are European settler colonialists and not the same Jews who went to exile.
[1] Israel Science and Technology Directory History of Israel: What is Palestine and Palestinians
[2] Judith Davis: How “Palestinians” Arrived in Palestine, Times of Israel Nov 20 2014, https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/how-palestinians-arrived-in-palestine/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_Palestine
[4] New Zealand History: The Ottoman Empire, https://nzhistory.govt.nz/war/ottoman-empire/rise-of-arab-nationalism
[5] Moshe Aumann: Land Ownership in Palestine, 1880-1948
[6] A Survey of Palestine, prepared by the British Mandate for the UN, p. 566, http://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Maps/Story573.html
[7] Sources: Palestine Government, A Survey of Palestine (3 vols., Jerusalem, 1946), vol. 1, p. 41 and Cunningham Papers (St. Antony’s College Oxford, Middle East Centre), Box 1, File 2, tg 1775 of 23 September 1946
[8] Joseph E. Katz: Middle Eastern Political and Religious History Analyst, Brooklyn, New York (Substantial Immigration of Arab Migrant workers into Western Palestine from 1880-1948)
[9] David Hirst: The Gun and the Olive Branch, Nation Books, 2003, Second edition, p.185, citing Haaretz, 15 November 1969
[10] Ghassan Kanafani: The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, published in English by Committee for a Democratic Palestine, New York, 1972 and by Tricontinental Society, London, 1980 http://www.shoah.org.uk/2011/02/13/the-1936-1939-revolt-in-palestine/ and https://www.marxists.org/archive/kanafani/1972/revolt.htm
[11] Ibid
[12] Franklin Foer: Selling Land To Jews, May 18, 1997, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/1997/05/selling-land-to-jews.html
[13] Muhsin Yusuf: The Partition of Palestine – An Arab Perspective
[14] http://www.palestineremembered.com/download/B-G%20LetterTranslation.pdf
[15] Center for Israel Education: Golda Meir Has Secret Meeting with King Abdullah in Amman, 2018, https://israeled.org/golda-meir-secret-meeting-king-abdullah-amman/
[16] Ann Gibbons: Jews and Arabs Share Recent Ancestry, 30 October 2000, https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2000/10/jews-and-arabs-share-recent-ancestry
[17] Raphael Falk Genetic markers cannot determine Jewish descent. Front Genet. 2014, 5: 462, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4301023/
[18] Alex Joffe: Palestinian Settler-Colonialism, https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/palestinians-settlers-colonialism/
III. The Arabs Connection to Palestine
While relying heavily on the bible what the Zionists “forget” to tell us that we can find references to Arabs living in Canaan 4000 years ago in the Jewish bible and other sources.
While the Jewish bible is not an historical records and was written many hundreds years after the events that the bible tells, it is a useful tool that tells us what the priests of Judea and Israel believed in the Seventh century BC, the time the stories of bible were collected and began to be edited. Thus it is of interest what the bible and other sources tell us about the Arabs in Canaan.
According to the bible book of Genesis, some of the children of Isma’il – son of Hagar, Abraham’s woman – are the Naba’aithi, Kedar, Massa.
The bible says: “as for Ishmael, I have heard thee: behold I have blessed him, and will make him fruitful, and will multiply him exceedingly; twelve princes shall he beget, and I will make him a great nation.” Genesis 17:20
“Now these are the generations of Ishmael, Abraham’s son, whom Hagar the Egyptian, Sarah’s handmaid, bore unto Abraham: And these are the names of the sons of Ishmael, by their names, according to their generations: The firstborn of Ishmael, Nebajoth, and Kedar, and Adbeel, and Mibsam, and Mishma, and Dumah, and Massa, Hadad and Tema, Jetur, Naphish and Kedmah. These are the sons of Ishmael, and these are their names, by their towns and by their encampments; twelve princes according to their nations.” Genesis 25:12-16
According to Achtemeier, the term “Ishamelite” was the same as “Midianites.” [1] According to the Jewish Bible the wife of Moses was a Midianites.
“Zipporah is a Midianite woman who becomes the wife of Moses. After Moses kills an Egyptian, he flees from the pharaoh and settles among the Midianites, an Arab people who occupied desert areas in southern Transjordan, northern Arabia, and the Sinai. He meets the seven daughters of Reuel, priest of Midian, at a well; rescues them from shepherds who are harassing them; and fills their jugs with water. In gratitude, Reuel (called Jethro or Hobab in other biblical passages) offers Moses hospitality, then gives him his daughter Zipporah in marriage (Exod 2:21–22). She and Moses have two sons, Gershom and Eliezer (Exod 18:3–4).” [2]
According to the Bible after the death of his beloved Sarah, Abraham took another wife, Keturah, (Genesis 25). She became the mother of Abraham’s six sons: Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak and Shuah who became the progenitors of six Arabian tribes of Southern and Eastern Palestine. [3]
Thus according to the Jewish bible the Arabs have the same old ties to the country as the ancient Hebrews. Is it possible?
According to the genetic and paleontological record, people began to leave Africa between 60,000 and 70,000 years ago possibly because of major climatic changes during the last Ice Age. This cold almost killed the African ancestors and reduced them may be to fewer than 10,000. Once the climate began to improve the population expanded, and some intrepid explorers moved beyond Africa. The earliest people to colonize the Eurasian landmass likely did so across the Bab-al-Mandab Strait separating present-day Yemen from Djibouti. [4] After settling Yemen they moved on. One of the places these African Yemen people settled was Canaan. The kings of Assyria called these people Qidar, Tamudi, Naba’aiti, Ma’asei and Kushi. The Nab’aiti were occupants of Petra and Jordan and were among the “Amurru” or Amorites. [5]
In addition the Jews who remained in Palestine after the Jews were exiled by the Romans converted to Islam. Thus while the history of Arabs in this country goes back probably of 4000 years, the history of Islam in this country is of 1400 years and the history of Zionism in this country is about 120 years.
To be sure modern Arabs neither Palestinians are not the same people as the ancient Amories and Canaanites. It is a different society. Among Palestinians are people of different origins. The only reason we pointed out to the historical ties of the Arabs to Palestine is to show the hypocrisy of the Zionists. However it is clear that the Arabs have a long history as native to Palestine unlike the European Zionists.
What is beyond the understanding of the Zionists is that in the real world nations appears under certain conditions and disappear under certain conditions, for example a major military defeat. For example the Babylonians, Sumerians, Mohavites Edomites the nation based on the ten tribes of the kingdoms of Israel have disappeared. The ancient nation of Judea disappeared with the occupation of Canaan and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. The Jews of today are no more the same people of ancient Judea than the Germans of today are the same people like the Teutonic tribes, and the Italians of today are the same people of the ancient Romans. Such claims are based on racial arguments of genetic.
Palestine was not an empty land waiting for the Zionists. It was inhabited by Muslims, Christians and Jews. The fact is that prior to Zionism tens of thousands of Jews lived in Palestine as a small minority in four cities: Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron. They were mostly old people who were supported economically by Jewish European communities and in general had good relations with the Arabs neighbors. They came to Palestine after the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. They arrived for religious reason not because they saw themselves as a nation returning to the promise land to form a state.
The Zionists were aware of the fact that Palestine was inhabited. No other than Israel Zangwill, a leading Zionist, stated in 1905: “Palestine proper has already its inhabitants. The pashalik of Jerusalem is already twice as thickly populated as the United States, having fifty-two souls to the square mile, and not 25% of them Jews….. [We] must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the [Arab] tribes in possession as our forefathers did or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan and accustomed for centuries to despise us.” [6]
The Zionists of course were not the first one to use the bible to justify colonization. The White European Puritans who colonized North America claimed that they are the chosen people settling in the Promised Land.
“The Puritans were obsessed with the Bible and came to identify their political struggle against England with that of the ancient Hebrews against Pharaoh or the King of Babylon. Because they identified so strongly with ancient Israel, they chose to identify with the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible).” (World Book Encyclopedia & Encyclopaedia Judaica) In 1620, the “Separatists” sailed for America on the Mayflower. The Separatists/Puritans who settled at Plymouth Colony called themselves “Pilgrims” because of their wanderings in search of religious freedom. The Puritan culture of New England was marked from the outset by a deep association with Jewish themes. No Christian community in history identified more with the Israelites of the Bible than did the first generations of settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who believed their own lives to be a literal reenactment of the biblical drama of the chosen people―they were the children of Israel and the ordinances of God’s Holy covenant by which they lived were His divine law.” [7]
This was also the case with the Boers of South Africa who saw themselves as the chosen people and South Africa as the Promised Land.
“With this unified movement of Boers to the north, there arose a feeling among them that they were retracing the Biblical account of the Exodus into the Promised Land. The Boers also came to view the Bantu as like those tribes spoken of in the Biblical account of the conquest of Canaan, so the Boers chose to eradicate the indigenous peoples as had the Israelites.” [8]
The Real History of Palestine
Now that we have dealt with the Zionist myths, lies and racial politics, let us begin our inquiry of the history of this country.
This Jewish (Judea) nation survived until the occupation of Judea by the Roman general Titus (70 A.D). After the occupation of Judea by the Roman and the total destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish temple many of the Jews left Palestine and migrated to other countries. Some Jewish tribes crossed the Syrian Desert and entered the Arabian Peninsula where they settled in Hijaz. In course of time they built up numerous colonies in Medina and between Medina and Syria. They converted many Arabs to Judaism. At the beginning of the seventh century A.D., there were three Jewish tribes living in Medina (Yathrib). They were Banu Qainuka’a, Banu Nadhir and Banu Qurayza.
Some Jews remained in Palestine. The Babylonian Talmud tells the story of Rabbi Johanan Ben Zakkai who escaped from the Roman siege of Jerusalem. Through flattery, and by humbling himself before the Roman general, he was able to negotiate a deal, allowing him to establish a new center of learning in the city of Yavneh (Gittin 56b). The Talmud describes a contract in which the Jews swear not to return to Israel by force, not to rebel against the nations, and not to extend or prematurely shorten the length of their exile; God then promises to prevent the subjugating nations from overly oppressing the Jews while they live under foreign rule (Ketubot 110b-111a).
In Palestine the Rabbis developed a new Jewish religion focus on teaching the bible and interpreted it rather than a religion based on scarifying animals in the temple. The most important religious interpretation of the Bible in Palestine was the Yerushalmi Talmud which is an extensive literary work consisting of both Halakhah (law) and Aggadah (legends), built upon the Mishnah of Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi. This literary work came to an end with the arrival of the Arab Muslims. Why is that? The simple answer is that the Jews converted to Islam.
“Judea was a Persian colony until it was occupied by Alexander the Great (356-323 BC).In 332 B.C Canaan was conquered by Alexander the Great. By the time Alexander died at age thirty‑three in 323 B.C., he had conquered the entire area from Macedonia to India. Palestine was part of this new empire. After Alexander’s death, his generals, known as Diadochi (“successors”) were unable to maintain the unity of the empire and it soon fragmented. During the period of the Diadochi, Canaan changed hands between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids five times. The lack of stability gave the Jews some degree of local autonomy, enhancing the already significant power of the priests in Judea. By 301 B.C. E., however, Ptolemy established a firm hold on Palestine. Ptolemaic military units were stationed throughout Palestine, and many Greek cities were established. Many of these were set up as cleruchies (military colonies) in which soldiers who married native women were given homes and fields, thus fostering the intermarriage.” [9]
Historical investigation into Hellenistic imperial culture, however, is discovering that what modern biblical scholars have termed religious persecution was virtually nonexistent and cannot explain how or why a Hellenistic emperor, even the notorious Antiochus IV Epiphanes, would have mounted such a pogrom against the Jews. From the limited sources for the history of Second Temple Judea it is clear, that Judea was not just a place where a religion, “Judaism,” was practiced and was not even an independent temple-state. Judean society was subject to, indeed a subordinate unit of a succession of empires. There was a conflict between rival factions in the ruling Jerusalem aristocracy that were closely related to rival Hellenistic empires. The priestly aristocracy, headed by a high priest, that had consolidated its power in Judea under the Persian Empire, continued under the Hellenistic empires. However toward the end of the 3rd century BC the empire gave Joseph, son of Tobiah by a sister of the high priest Onias, the power to collect taxes and this reduced the power of the other priests. He taxed heavily the peasants. The situation was similar to the Judean aristocracy’s exploitation of the peasants during Nehemiah over two centuries earlier (Neh 5:1-13). Long before the Hellenizing reform in 175 B.C., the Jerusalem aristocracy was divided between a Hellenizing party that was pro-Seleucid and a more traditionalist party that remained pro-Ptolemaic. When the Seleucid governor Ptolemy expelled the Ptolemaic garrison in Jerusalem after Antiochus III’s victory over the Ptolemaic army a section of the aristocratic priests supported his rule. Antiochus used the same policy of the Persians of supporting the temple-state as the instrument of imperial control and taxation of Judea. Later on Antiochus changed his policy and gave the power to collect taxes to other powerful figure than the high priest. A large faction of the aristocracy took the accession to power of Antiochus IV Epiphanes in 175 B.C.E.as an occasion to implement a Hellenizing “reform” which meant higher taxes. There were some religious aspects of it, such as the neglect of the sacrifices, and the forms instituted were indeed from Hellenistic culture. Conflict within the reforming faction led to Antiochus’s invasion of Jerusalem and his violent repression of resistance by Judeans who insisted on their traditional way of life. Although it is not clear just what measures he took, it seems likely that at this point Antiochus ordered the suppression of ancestral law and sacrifices in Jerusalem and Judea. And it also seems likely that these measures were an attempt to counter the continuing resistance of scribal circles and others that were deeply rooted in those ancestral laws and rites. This led to the rebellion led by Maccabees and the rule of the Hasmonean dynasty.
The Romans replaced the Seleucids as the great power in the region, they granted the Hasmonean king, Hyrcanus II, limited autonomy under the Roman governor of Damascus. The last attempt to restore the Hasmonean dynasty was made by Mattathias Antigonus, whose defeat and death brought Hasmonean rule to an end (40 BC), and the Land became a province of the Roman Empire.
In 37 BCE, Herod, a non-Jew and son-in-law of Hyrcanus II, was appointed King of Judea by the Romans. Ten years after Herod’s death in 4 BCE, Judea came under direct Roman administration. This led to a revolt in 66 CE. Superior Roman forces led by Titus were victorious, razing Jerusalem to the ground (70 CE) and defeating the last Jewish outpost at Masada (73 CE). Titus ordered the total destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. Then came the revolt of Shimon Bar Kokhba (132 CE), during which Jerusalem and Judea were regained for a short period. Three years later, in conformity with Roman custom, Jerusalem was “plowed up with a yoke of oxen,” Judea was renamed Palaestinia and Jerusalem, Aelia Capitolina. With this the Jews ceased being a nation.
The Christians in Palestine
The history of Christianity began in Canaan with the birth of Jesus and through his teaching. Jesus was a Jew. Jews under the Roman rule were waiting for a leader – the Messiah that would rescue them from their Roman oppressors, and establish a new kingdom. While the religious leaders and political leaders of the Jews rejected Jesus as the Messiah, many Jewish people and local Greeks did embrace Jesus in the early years of the Church, and this is how Christianity recruited the first followers. Its beginning was inside the Jewish religion, it became a sect of Judaism. It began to grow, after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in the year 70 AD. With the dispersing of Jews all over the Roman Empire, Christianity began to spread all over the Roman Empire.
The early Christians were persecuted. Why was that? The Roman religion was not intolerant; Rome had accepted into its pantheon deities from the Italian tribes and from Asia Minor. In the provinces, the great territorial gods—such as Saturn in North Africa and Jehovah among the Jews—were accepted as “legal religion” on the grounds that their rites, were sanctified by ancient tradition. Countless local gods and goddesses, worshiped by the ordinary inhabitants of the Greco-Roman world, were often provided with a new name and worshiped as “Roman” deities.
There are many attempts to explain the reasons for the persecution of the early Christians, mostly from a religious perspective. For example a common explanation is that the Christians refused to accept the Roman emperors as semi gods. According to the BBC, “Pagans were probably most suspicious of the Christian refusal to sacrifice to the Roman gods. This was an insult to the gods and potentially endangered the empire which they designed to protect. Furthermore, the Christian refusal to offer sacrifices to the emperor, a semi-divine monarch, had the whiff of both sacrilege and treason about it.” [10]
This is not convincing because the Jews also refused to accept the Roman emperors as semi gods and were not persecuted at that period. Most likely they were persecuted because Christianity was spread among the slaves and the concept that slaves were somehow equal to their masters even after life was a dangerous idea from the perspective of the slave masters.
The Christians accused the Jews for the death of Jesus. It is true that the high Jewish priest Joseph Caiaphas was the High Priest of the Temple at the time of the Crucifixion and he tried him in a kangaroo court and convicts him on a religious charge that carries the death penalty. However many Jews supported Jesus and cannot be blame for the actions of Caiaphas. At the same time the Jewish upper class helped the Romans to persecute the early Christians. Historians debate the role of the Jews in the maltreatment of early Christians. The Jewish role was definitely exaggerated at times, as when Justin Martyr claimed that the Jews “kill and punish us whenever they have the power.” Various scholars believe the Jewish role in the Martyrdom of Polycarp is exaggerated. Scholars caution against such over-generalizations and exaggerations, but the “parting of the ways” did lead to bitter disputes and Jews at times mistreated members of the new Jesus movement. The Apostle Paul declares, “five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one” (2 Cor 11:24). He says that his own ministry led to tensions with Jews (1 Thess 2:14–16). When the Christians became powerful in the fourth century they began to persecute the Jews. “The Theodosian Code shows us that those immunities which had been granted to the Jews by the pagan emperors, and which had made them a privileged class dwelling within the Roman world, were continued by the Christian emperors. At the opening of the fourth century Jews were classed as Roman citizens and enjoyed all the advantages of civic status. They were in every economic stratum of the empire; many were rich, many were poor. Some were merchants, others artisans, and still others farmers. They had their own cult organizations called synagogues. (…) The main Jewish privilege was that Jews could not be forced to perform any task which violated their religious convictions. This meant that they were exempt from the crushing burden of the decurionate, that responsibility for the collection of imperial taxes which was gradually impoverishing the middle class of the Roman world. (…) At the opening of the fourth century the central Jewish administrative council, called the Sanhedrin, was very active in Palestine, and several schools were in operation there under the guidance of the Jewish Nasi or patriarch. (…) When Christianity was legalized in 313 and became the close ally of the Roman emperors, this indifference quickly became a thing of the past. Thus in 321 Constantine promulgated the earliest law recorded in the Theodosian Code dealing with the Jews; it begins the process of reducing their privileges and immunities.” [11]
Palestine under the Moslems
Many Jews resided in the Roman Empire According to Bar Hebraeus, who was a bishop of the Syrian Orthodox Church who lived between 1226 and 1286 AD: “At the same time Claudius Caesar ordered the Jews to be counted, and their number was 6,944,000 men.” [12]
If indeed there were 7 million Jews in the Roman Empire by now the number of the Jews would be probably over 100 million. This indicates that many Jews converted to other religions.
It was not until the conquest of Iraq, Syria and Egypt that the Muslims came in contact with large numbers of Christians and Jews. Damascus surrendered in 635, Iraq in 637, Jerusalem in 638, and Alexandria in 641. Iraq, Syria and Egypt were predominantly Christian at the time of the conquest. This indicated that many Jews converted to Christianity. In dealing with an overwhelmingly Christian population, Khalid ibn al-Walid, the Arab commander to whom Damascus capitulated, issued the following declaration to the people of Damascus:
“In the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful. This is what Khalid ibn al-Walid would grant to the inhabitants of Damascus if he enters therein: he promises to give them security for their lives, property, and churches. Their city shall not be demolished, neither shall any Muslim be quartered in their houses. Thereunto we give them the pact of Allah and the protection of his Prophet, the caliphs, and the believers. So long as they pay the poll tax, nothing but good shall befall them.” [13]
In return for submission and the payment of the Jizya, the poll tax, Islam guaranteed the Christians and the Jews security of life, property and protection in the exercise of their religions. The different communities had full autonomy under the leadership of their religious chiefs. Each community exercised jurisdiction over matters of personal status, such as marriage, divorce and inheritance. So long as they submitted to the Muslim state and paid the Jizya, Christians and Jews were left alone to run their own lives without interference. [14] This led most of the Jews in Palestine to convert to Islam.
Declaring he would leave the Zionist Organization if Israel Zangwill’s alleged views on the expropriation of the Arabs from Palestine were to prevail, Dr. Arthur Rupin, the Zionist colonization expert, made the startling assertion that the Arabs of Palestine were descendants of old Palestine Jews who had been converted to Mohammedism.
Dr. Rupin was addressing the convention of Austrian Zionists here. He emphasized that the Arab question can be solved only economically, through cooperation between Jew and Arab in Palestine, and not through politics. Rejecting Mr. Zangwill’s suggestion that there was a time when the Arabs could have been made to trek to some other territory, Dr. Rupin said, “Remember the Palestine Arabs are descendants of the Jews of Old Palestine, converted to Islam.” [15]
Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, wrote, a few months before issuance of the Balfour Declaration, an interesting treatise: “On the Origin of the Falahin, the Arab peasants in Palestine“. [16] In this work, Ben-Gurion, argued that the falahin are descendants of Jews who remained in Palestine after the Roman expulsion and who later converted to Islam: “The logical, self-evident conclusion of all the above is as follows: The agricultural community that the Arabs found in Eretz Israel in the 7th century was none other than the Hebrew farmers that remained on their land despite all the persecution and oppression of the Roman and Byzantine emperors. Some of them accepted Christianity, at least on the surface, but many held on to their ancestral faith and occasionally revolted against their Christian oppressors. After the Arab conquest, the Arabic language and Muslim religion spread gradually among the countrymen. In his essay “Ancient Names in Palestine and Syria in Our Times,” Dr. George Kampmeyer proves, based on historico-linguistic analysis, that for a certain period of time, both Aramaic and Arabic were in use and only slowly did the former give way to the latter. The greater majority and main structures of the Muslim falahin in western Eretz Israel present to us one racial strand and a whole ethnic unit, and there is no doubt that much Jewish blood flows in their veins—the blood of those Jewish farmers, “lay persons”, who chose in the travesty of times to abandon their faith in order to remain on their land.”
This knowledge did not prevent him from driving out the Palestinian peasants. Not because he hated them but because they were an obstacle to his aspiration to create a Zionist settler colonialist state.
In this sense he was not different from Jabotinsky, the historical founder of what today is the Likud party, who understood that the Zionists are settler colonialists. He wrote:” There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future. I say this with such conviction, not because I want to hurt the moderate Zionists. I do not believe that they will be hurt. Except for those who were born blind, they realised long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting “Palestine” from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority. … The native populations, civilized or uncivilized, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilized or savage…. our own ancestors under Joshua Ben Nun, behaved like brigands; but the Pilgrim Fathers, the first real pioneers of North America, were people of the highest morality, who did not want to do harm to anyone, least of all to the Red Indians, and they honestly believed that there was room enough in the prairies both for the Paleface and the Redskin. Yet the native population fought with the same ferocity against the good colonists as against the bad. Our Peace-mongers are trying to persuade us that the Arabs are either fools, whom we can deceive by masking our real aims, or that they are corrupt and can be bribed to abandon to us their claim to priority in Palestine , in return for cultural and economic advantages. I repudiate this conception of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are five hundred years behind us, they have neither our endurance nor our determination; but they are just as good psychologists as we are, and their minds have been sharpened like ours by centuries of fine-spun logomachy. We may tell them whatever we like about the innocence of our aims, watering them down and sweetening them with honeyed words to make them palatable, but they know what we want, as well as we know what they do not want. They feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico , and their Sioux for their rolling Prairies.
There is only one thing the Zionists want, and it is that one thing that the Arabs do not want, for that is the way by which the Jews would gradually become the majority, and then a Jewish Government would follow automatically, and the future of the Arab minority would depend on the goodwill of the Jews; and a minority status is not a good thing, as the Jews themselves are never tired of pointing out. So there is no “misunderstanding” Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population, behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.” [17]
The image of the crusaders and their similarity to the Zionists is unavoidable. The first one in Israel who made this comparison was Uri Avnery. He wrote: “Some sixty years ago I wrote an article whose title was just that: “Crusaders and Zionists”. Perhaps it was the first on that subject. It raised a lot of opposition. At the time, it was a Zionist article of faith that no such similarity existed, tut-tut-tut. Unlike the Crusaders, the Jews are a nation. Unlike the Crusaders, who were barbarians compared to the civilized Muslims of their time, Zionists are technically superior. Unlike the Crusaders, the Zionists relied on their own manual labor. (That was before the Six-Day War, of course.)” [18]
The Crusaders
The Crusaders captured Palestine at the beginning of the first millennium. Between the 11th and the 15th centuries the Muslims and the Crusaders fought for Palestine.
The crusades began when Pope Urban II called for the first Crusade in 1095, after the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnos had asked for western volunteers to repel the Seljuk Turks from Anatolia. The Crusaders were motivated by rewards of many kinds: financial aid from the church, forgiveness from God for sins, feudal obligations, to gain glory and honor, or political and economic gain. They captured Palestine in 1099 massacring both Muslims and Jews. They established the crusader states of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Tripoli, the Principality of Antioch, and the County of Edessa. The First Crusade massacred Jews and orthodox Eastern Christians.
In 1187 Saladin, a Sunni Muslim of Kurdish origin, led a military campaign against the Crusaders and defeated them. He became Sultan of Egypt and Syria, and his conquests included Egypt, Syria, Upper Mesopotamia (north Iraq, northeastern Syria and southwestern Turkey), Hejaz, Yemen and into North Africa. Saladin took Palestine (and Jerusalem) from the Crusaders at the Battle of Hattin in 1187. [19]
“When Saladin occupied Jerusalem He did not shed the blood of Christians in Jerusalem. He freed the old, the widows, and the children to ensure that they were not condemned to a life of slavery. For forty days, he granted all Christians from foreign lands safe departure and allowed them to return to their respective countries with their property. He found the male guardians for Christian women to ensure that they were provided protection and shelter on their return journeys. He allowed the Eastern Christians to stay and reinstated the right of every Jew to visit and resettle in Jerusalem. He conquered Jerusalem on a Saturday and ordered that the Church be open on Sunday for services.” [20]
Palestine under the Ottomans
From 1516 until the end of World War I for four hundred years, western Asia was ruled by the Ottoman Empire. The majestic walls encircling the Old City of Jerusalem were built by the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-66).
The Ottomans continued the Muslim tradition of tolerance toward Christian religious interests in Palestine. The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem was acknowledged in the sixteenth century as the custodian of the Christian holy places, and from about the same time France became the guardian of the Latin clergy. The Ottoman Empire opened its gates to the Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Spain and other parts of Christendom. Most of these Jews did not choose to live in Palestine. Thus the number of Jews in Jerusalem in the first century after the Ottoman conquest dropped from 1,330 in 1525 to 980 in 1587.
The land trade routes between Syria and Egypt passed through Palestine, while the pilgrimage routes to Mecca (converged at the Palestinian port of Aqaba). By the mid-nineteenth century, many European powers had consulates in the country, with the exception of the Maronite sections of Mount Lebanon. Palestine was the most exposed and accessible to Christian and European influences. One of the ways the European imperialists influenced Palestine was by the so-called Capitulations – a system of extraterritorial privileges granted to nationals of European powers who resided in the Ottoman Empire. The early Zionist immigrants and settlers were to make full use of the Capitulations.
In 1887-88, the population Palestine was around 600,000. About 10 percent of whom were Christians and the rest mostly Sunnite Muslims. The Jews numbered about 25,000; the majorities were deeply religious. Until the advent of Zionism, relations between Palestinians and Jews were stable and peaceful, mellowed by more than a millennium of coexistence and often shared adversity.
The Palestinians considered themselves to be descended not only from the Arab conquerors of the seventh century but also from indigenous peoples who had lived in the country since time immemorial, including the ancient Hebrews and the Canaanites before them. [21]
Thus it is true that Jews lived in Palestine during the Ottoman rule, but they were a small minority who lived in Palestine for religious and not nationalist reasons. These people arrived after the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 and had nothing to do with the Zionists aspirations. Jews were concentrated principally in the holy cities of Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron. Nonetheless, the Jewish presence in Palestine, prior to the establishment of the State of Israel, had fluctuated through time, with various communities appearing and disappearing. Regardless, in 1880, before the Zionist immigration began, Palestine’s Jewish population numbered about 25,000, and had been deeply rooted there for several generations. The number of Jews in Palestine increased from 13,900 in 1872 to 26,000 in 1880, when the region also had about 400,000 Muslims and 43,000 Christians. By 1895 about 28,000 Jews were a majority in Jerusalem, and this increased to 35,000 by 1905 and 45,000 in 1914. That year Palestine registered 722,000 residents. [22]
These Jews who arrived to Palestine during the rule of the Ottomans did not consider themselves as members of a world Jewish nation, nor did they try to possess the country. For this reason they have good relations with the Arabs.
Thus the distortion of history serves the Zionist propaganda machine. The truth is very simple: the European Zionists are not the same people as the ancient Hebrews. They are settler colonialists that in the name of creating a Jewish state expelled some of the children of the Ancient Jews.
[1] Achtemeier, Paul J., Th.D., Harper’s Bible Dictionary, (San Francisco: Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.) 1985
[2] Tikva Frymer-Kensky Zipporah: Bible Jewish Women Archive, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/Zipporah-bible
[3] Levi Avtzon: Who Was Keturah and Why Did Abraham Marry Her? https://www.chabad.org/parshah/article_cdo/aid/4171660/jewish/Who-Was-Keturah-and-Why-Did-Abraham-Marry-Her.htm
[4] https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/human-journey/
[5] Dana Marniche: The Afro-Arabian Origins Of The Israelites And Ishmaelites Pt 1, January 18, 2009, https://www.africaresource.com/rasta/sesostris-the-great-the-egyptian-hercules/the-black-and-comely-sons-and-daughters-of-ismail-ishmael-dana-marniche/
[6] Benny Morris: Righteous Victims, 1999, p. 140
[7] Hugh Fogelman: Puritans Were More Jewish Than Protestants
[8] Blake Williams: Apartheid In South Africa: Calvin’s Legacy?
[9] Lawrence H. Schiffman: The Land Of Israel In The Hellenistic Age https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/palestine-in-the-hellenistic-age/
[10] Dr Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe: Christianity and the Roman Empire, BBC, 17.02.2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/christianityromanempire_article_01.shtml
[11] James Everett Seaver: Persecution of the Jews in the Roman Empire (300-438), University Of Kansas Press, 1952, pp. 5-6
[12] https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/06/14/jews-in-the-roman-empire
[13] Philip K. Hitti, History of the Arabs, 8th ed. (London, 1964), p. 150; Zachary Karabell, Peace Be Upon You (New York: Knopf, 2007), p. 27
[14] Najib Saliba: Christians and Jews Under Islam, http://www.alhewar.com/Saliba_Christians_and_Jews_Under_Islam.htm
[15] Says Palestine Arabs Are Jews Converted to Islam, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 13.11.1923, https://www.jta.org/1923/11/13/archive/says-palestine-arabs-are-jews-converted-to-islam/
[16] “Leverur Motsa Ha’Falahim,” Luach Achiezer, New York, 1917, pp. 118-27, reprinted in Anachnu U’Shcheneinu (Tel Aviv: Davar. 1931), pp. 13-25
[17] Ze’ev Jabotinsky: The Iron Wall The Iron Wall, Original in Russian, Razsviet, 4.11.1923
[18] Uri Avnery: Crusaders and Zionists 11/10/2014
[19] https://www.welcometopalestine.com/history-of-palestine/the-crusades/
[20] Hasher Nisar: What We Can Learn From Saladin, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/hasher-nisar/saladin-lessons_b_8704244.html
[21] The Institute for Palestine Studies: Special Focus – Ottoman Palestine, Journal of Palestine Studies, Jerusalem Quarterly, https://www.palestine-studies.org/resources/special-focus/ottoman-palestine
[22] Sanderson Beck: Palestine and Zionism 1700-1950, http://www.san.beck.org/16-6-PalestineandZionism.html
IV. Zionist Colonization
Note of the Editorial Board: The following chapter contains two maps. For technical reasons these can only be viewed in the pdf version of the book which can be downloaded here.
The defenders of Zionism claim that the idea of Zionism of granting the Jews a state is morally sound in particular after the extermination of 6 million Jews by the Nazis, and the growing Anti-Semitism. The only problem is that it was implement without due regard to the rights of the Palestinians. The same of course could be said about South Africa, Nigeria, Australia, Algeria Vietnam, Cambodia, Latin America, India, China the USA and many others. The fact however is that if colonialism in all its forms could be implemented without the repression, the murder, the theft of the lands and the natural resources, it would not be colonialism. In Hebrew they used to say “if my grandmother had wheels instead of legs she would not need a bus”.
Thus the real question is whether the Zionists are settler colonialists or, as the Zionists claim, it is the nation that was exiled 2000 years ago that has returned to its ancient land and the Palestinians that have lived for generations in Palestine are the real settler colonialists. To believe the Zionist narrative you must believe in fairytales as well. What would you say about a person who takes over your house claiming that it belongs to him because his ancient grandfathers 2000 years ago lived on the land your house is built on, and then in his generosity offers you the washroom as your place and asks you to announce that the house belongs to him?
The first leader of the Jewish Zionists movement was Theodore Herzl. However, the Zionist ideology did not begin with Herzl or the Jews. It began with Christian Zionism. Christian Zionism began among Protestants of the 16th century and 17th century in England. In 1607, Thomas Brightman published a book by the name “Revelation of the Revelation”, where he spoke of the return of the Jews to Palestine. Isaac de la Peyrere (1594-1676), the French Ambassador to Denmark, wrote a similar book by the name ”Rappel des Juifs”.
In the 18th century, the Christian Zionist Movement, under the name “Restoration Movement”, was led by Thomas Newton, the Bishop of Bristol who preached the same idea.
In the 19th century one of the leaders of the Christian Zionists was Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury and a member of the Tory party. Shaftesbury argued for a Jewish return as a way to advance the economic and political interests of England. In 1853 Shaftesbury wrote to the Prime Minister, Lord Aberdeen, that Greater Syria was “a country without a nation” in need of “a nation without a country… Is there such a thing? To be sure there is, the ancient and rightful lords of the soil, the Jews!” [1] This is of course the origin of the Zionist slogan coined by the British Jewish Zionist Israel Zangwill: “A land without people for people without a land”.
One of the Christian Zionists was the Chaplin William H. Hechler who worked with Herzl and attended the first Zionist Congress. [2]
The Christian Zionists influenced Balfour and his known declaration of 1917 in which Arthur Balfour wrote that the British government viewed “with favor the establishment of a Jewish national home” in Palestine. Another known Christian Zionist was Orde Wingate who trained the Zionist terrorist organization “night operation”. He said: “There is only one way to deal with the situation, to persuade the gangs that, in their predatory raids, there is every chance of their running into a government gang which is determined to destroy them. The units would carry the offensive to the enemy, take away his initiative and keep him off-balance, and …produce in their minds the belief government forces will move at night and can and will surprise them either in villages or across country.” [3]
Thus, in the case of Christian Zionism the Gospel became the ideology of imperialism colonialism and militarism. David Lloyd-George was even more pro Zionist than Balfour. From Great Britain Christian Zionism moved to the USA where it was adopted by a number of Protestant theologians including the evangelist Dwight Moody, C.I. Schofiled and William E Blackstone. The Christian Zionists saw the wars of 1948 and 1967 as miracles of God and the beginning of the end of times which is a period of wars, destructions and the building of the Jewish third temple. They are hard supporters of Zionist apartheid in the whole of Palestine. According to their belief system Jesus will return to reign on Earth after an epic battle between good and evil. The Zionists are the good and the Muslims are the bad. The Evangelical leader Pat Robertson while on his tour of Israel during the Israel-Lebanon war said, “The Jews are God’s chosen people. Israel is a special nation that has a special place in God’s heart. He will defend this nation. So Evangelical Christians stand with Israel. That is one of the reasons I am here.” [4]
In addition to the Christian Zionists, Napoleon Bonaparte advocated a Jewish autonomy under French protection in Palestine in 1799 during his battle in Acre as part of his war with the Ottoman Empire.
He wrote: “The great nation which does not trade in men and countries as did those which sold your ancestors unto all people (Joel 4:6) herewith calls on you not indeed to conquer your patrimony; nay, only to take over that which has been conquered and, with that nation’s warranty and support, to remain master of it to maintain it against all comers.” [5]
The Zionist program of removing the Jews from Europe and settle them in Palestine was accepted by the Anti-Semites with open arms.
One of the known Anti Semite document is the “Protocol of the Elder of Zion” that claims that the Jews ruled the word. Another document less known stated:
“The wealthy Jews rule the world. In their hands lies the fate of governments and nations. They start wars between countries and, when they wish, governments make peace. When the wealthy Jews sing, the nations and their leaders dance along and meanwhile the Jews get richer”. It was written by Herzl in an article he wrote in the Deutsche Zeitung newspaper. [6]
Hitler did not fear retribution for the Holocaust. Why? He didn’t think the world would care, asking, as he prepared to invade Poland “Who today still speaks of the massacre of the Armenians”? [7]
In 1915 many people were not aware of the genocide of the Armenians. Herzl helped to hide the massacres of the Armenians: In 1896, Herzl made a trip to Constantinople in an attempt to meet Sultan Abdul Hamid to negotiate the purchase of Palestine. The Sultan did not meet him at that time but his aides asked Herzl if he could work on the Armenian issue in the European press? Turkey was getting bashed for its treatment of the Armenians and Herzl agreed to do so. [8]
Joseph Massad, a professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University and the author of the book “Islam in Liberalism”, wrote on the emerging alliance between Zionists and European ultra-nationalists and reflected on an ongoing historical development that dates back to the late 19th century.
In an interview he said: “Israel has no problem allying itself with anti-Semites who support its colonialism.” Massad detailed the collaboration between Theodore Herzl with anti-Semites like Vyacheslav von Plehve, who oversaw brutal pogroms as the police chief of imperial Russia. ”Arthur Balfour, supported Zionism “notwithstanding or precisely because of his anti-Semitic sentiment”.
“Zionists like Herzl and anti-Semites like Balfour shared the view that the presence of assimilationist-minded Jews on the continent was unacceptable. Herzl “disdained poor Jews in Western Europe and blamed them for anti-Semitism.”
“Like Herzl, anti-Semitic European elites viewed a Jewish state as a convenient means for reducing the Jewish population within their societies. “Anti-Semites saw in Zionism a kindred spirit and they shared with other Zionists the understanding that getting rid of European Jews somewhere else is a goal that they share.”
“The alliance deepened during World War Two, as the Zionist movement broke the international Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany to embark on a lucrative Transfer Agreement with Hitler’s government that exchanged Jewish property for the bodies the Zionists needed to colonize Palestine. Eichmann was a guest of the Zionist movement in 1937, hosted for a tour of kibbutzim in historic Palestine by a double Zionist-Nazi agent Feibl Folkes.
Eichmann quoted Folkes to the effect that Zionist leaders were pleased by the persecution of European Jewry, since it would encourage emigration to Palestine,” the Israeli historian Tom Segev observed in his book ‘The Seventh Million’”. [9]
Richard Silverstein in the Jewish Magazine Tikun Olam wrote: “Eichmann didn’t just visit Palestine in 1937 to meet with the Zionist leadership. He didn’t just serve as the lead Nazi in implementing the Haavara Agreement. He actually endorsed Zionism and did so with fulsome praise. This New York Times review of In Memory’s Kitchen: “A Legacy From the Women of Terezin” quotes the memory of a Terezin survivor who met Eichmann: Anny Stern was one of the lucky ones. In 1939, after months of hassle with the Nazi bureaucracy, the occupying German Army at her heels, she fled Czechoslovakia with her young son and immigrated to Palestine. At the time of Anny’s departure, Nazi policy encouraged emigration. ‘‘Are you a Zionist?” Adolph Eichmann, Hitler’s specialist on Jewish affairs, asked her. ”Jawohl,” she replied. ”Good,” he said, ”I am a Zionist, too. I want every Jew to leave for Palestine.” there is an even more explosive story told of Eichmann’s self-identification with Zionism. It was published in Life Magazine in 1960 under the title, I Transported Them to the Butcher: Eichmann’s Story: “In the years that followed (after 1937) I often said to Jews with whom I had dealings that, had I been a Jew, I would have been a fanatical Zionist. I could not imagine anything else. In fact, I would have been the most ardent Zionist imaginable.” [10]
Francis R. Nicosia book “Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany’” does not hide the collaboration of the Zionists with the Nazis but he tried to excuse it by pointing out to the unequal relations between the Nazis and the Zionists.
“In the end, the relationship between Zionism and anti-Semitism in Germany helped to define what each was and, perhaps more importantly, what each was not during the period of about half a century before the onset of the final solution” (p. 9). “Thus, the policies of Hitler’s regime toward Zionism and the Zionist movement in Germany before 1941, as examples of the implementation of its anti-Semitic ideology, only diminish the likelihood that the ‘final solution’ was part of an earlier plan or intention to ultimately mass murder the Jews of Europe” (pp. 10-11). “Throughout the 1930s, as part of the regime’s determination to force the Jews to leave Germany, there was almost unanimous support in German government and Nazi party circles for promoting Zionism among German Jews, and Jewish emigration from Germany to Palestine” (p. 79).
The Nazis view Zionism as “an important instrument in addressing both parts of the process of reversing Jewish emancipation and assimilation in Germany and ending Jewish life in the Reich through emigration.” (p. 105).
Of course the Zionists had less power than the Nazis but having less power and collaborating willfully with the Nazis are two different things.
For the Zionists collaborating with the Nazis was justifiable as long as this helped the Zionist colonial project even when it cost the lives of many Jews. The aims determine the means. Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, said in 1938: “If I knew it was possible to save all [Jewish] children of Germany by their transfer to England and only half of them by transferring them to Eretz-Yisrael, I would choose the latter—because we are faced not only with the accounting of these [Jewish] children but also with the historical accounting of the Jewish People.” [11]
The Zionist reactionary ambition of colonizing Palestine was not the only option open to Jews. In the end of the 19th century the socialist movement was a strong movement and it opposed Anti-Semitism. In France the progressive movement defended Dreyfus. The Bolshevik revolution fought against Anti-Semitism.
The Zionists however preferred to serve the imperialists. In his diary Herzl wrote: “Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home. The very name of Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvelous potency. If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” [12]
In 1937 Trotsky wrote: “The Jewish question, I repeat, is indissolubly bound up with the complete emancipation of humanity. Everything else that is done in this domain can only be a palliative and often even a two-edged blade, as the example of Palestine shows.” [13]
Zionism and British Imperialism
In 1915 the British imperialists promised Hussein, the Sheriff of Mecca, in letters, known as McMahon–Hussein Correspondence, independence from the Turks for military support. At the same time behind the backs of the Arabs the British imperialists with France and Russia agreed to divide the Ottoman Empire amongst themselves in a deal known as The Sykes-Picot agreement. At the same time in 1917 the British came with Balfour Declaration promising the Zionist a national home in Palestine. At the end of the war France got Syria, North Iraq and Lebanon and the British got Palestine and South Iraq. The Russian got nothing because of the Bolshevik revolution, which published the secret agreements. [14]
Map 1 and 2 show what the British promised the Arabs and what the latter finally got after the end of World War I.
Map 1. British Promises of Arab Independence (1915)
Map 2. Arab Countries Occupied by Britain and France after World War One
The Zionists rely on Balfour Declaration as a legal document that legalizes the establishment of the state of Israel.
In the web site of the Israeli foreign Ministry we find: “During the First World War, British policy became gradually committed to the idea of establishing a Jewish home in Palestine (Eretz Yisrael). After discussions in the British Cabinet, and consultation with Zionist leaders, the decision was made known in the form of a letter by Arthur James Lord Balfour to Lord Rothschild. The letter represents the first political recognition of Zionist aims by a Great Power.” [15]
This letter raises the question: What were the reasons for Balfour Declaration?
Britain wanted the United States to join World War I and the British Government as typical Anti-Semites believed that Jews can influence the United State to join the war. In 1916, Balfour wrote Chaim Weizmann: “You know Dr Weizmann, if the Allies win the war you may get your Jerusalem.” [16] Another reason was to use the Russian Jews to influence the Kerensky government to continue the war alongside the allies. [17] After the Bolshevik revolution British imperialism hoped to turn the Jews against the revolution. In addition the British government wanted to use the Jews to help to control the Suez Canal the route to India. For the same reason they offered the Zionist earlier part of Uganda to guard the British railways. The British imperialists had the experience in Ireland which they controlled by settling there the protestants.
One of the Zionist claims is that the Zionist movement is the national liberation movement of the Jews: “Zionism is a modern national liberation movement whose roots go far back to Biblical times. Its purpose is to return to the Jewish people the independence and sovereignty which are the right of every people. The Jews lost that independence and sovereignty in the Judaeo-Roman war two thousand years ago”. [18]
In the first century Rome occupied Judea and ruled it for six hundred years, and lost it to the Muslims. Would any sane person accept an Italian claims to Palestine that was part of ancient Rome? The Assyrians of our days claim that they are the unbroken continuity of the Assyrian people from the times of the Assyrian empire to the present time. Assyria occupied the Israeli kingdom 3000 years ago, would any sane person accept a claim by the Assyrian to Palestine? Yet many people around the world believe that the Zionists have a legitimate claim on Palestine. The reason is that the imperialists and their mass media see in Israel the front line of reaction which is useful to prevent any progressive change of the Middle East. Israel’s willingness to take military action in its own neighborhood makes it an unparalleled strategic asset for the West.
Israel by its own admission admits that it has killed close to 100,000 Arabs. It does not distinguish between soldiers and civilians and most of the Arabs who were killed were civilians.
Table 3. Statistics: Total Casualties, Arab-Israeli Conflict [19]
Event Year(s) Jews/Israelis Arabs/Palestinians
Killed Wounded Killed± Wounded
Arab Riots 1920 6 200
Arab Riots 1921 43
Arab Riots 1924 133 116
Arab Riots 1929 135 399 87 91
Arab Riots 1936-39 415 5,000 15,000
War of Independence 1948 6,373 15,000 10,000
Sinai Campaign 1956 231 900 3,000 4,500
Six Day War 1967 776 2,586 18,300
War of Attrition 1968-70 1,424 2,700 5,000
Yom Kippur War 1973 2,688 19,000
First Lebanon War 1982 1,216 2,383 20,825 30,000
First Intifada 1987-93 200 1,162
Second Intifada 2000-2005 1,100 8,000 4,907 8,611
Second Lebanon War 2006 164 1,489 1,954 4,400
Operation Cast Lead 2008-09 14 1,272 1,434 5,000
Operation Pillar of Defense 2012 6 240 158
Operation Protective Edge 2014 73 664 2,100 11,000
Terrorism/Other 1860-Present 9,927
TOTAL: 24,969 36,260 91,105 78,038
The number of Arabs Israel killed is most likely even higher as this account does not include those wounded who died.
Let us return to Balfour Declaration. How relying on a letter of a British imperialist to Lord Rothschild is sitting with the phony statement that the Zionist is or was a national liberation i.e. an anti-imperialist movement? Furthermore this letter is not addressed to the Zionist movement but to Lord Rothschild, which does not make it an official British government document. In addition it does not speak about a Zionist state but about Zionist autonomy under a British protectorate in Palestine.
The Balfour Declaration was opposed by the non- Zionist Jewish communities who saw themselves nationals of their countries. Sir Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India who was the only Jewish member of the British Cabinet opposed the declaration on the ground that Jews do not constitute a nation he wrote:
“Zionism has always seemed to me to be a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom,… it seems to be inconceivable that Zionism should be officially recognized by the British Government, and that Mr. Balfour should be authorized to say that Palestine was to be reconstituted as the ‘national home of the Jewish people’. I do not know what this involves, but I assume that it means that Mohammedans and Christians are to make way for the Jews, and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference and should be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English or France with the French, that Turks and other Mohammedans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners… I deny that Palestine is today associated with the Jews or properly to be regarded as a fit place for them to live in. The Ten Commandments were delivered to the Jews on Sinai. It is quite true that Palestine plays a large part in Jewish history, but so it does in modern Mohammedan history, and, after the time of the Jews, surely it plays a larger part than any other country in Christian history …” [20]
Following the Treaty of Versailles the Allied Powers decided at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 to impose on the Arabs including in Palestine the mandates system introduced by the Covenant of the League of Nations, a body Lenin called a “den of thieves”. He wrote:
“The Soviet revolution in Germany will strengthen the international Soviet movement, which is the strongest bulwark (and the only reliable, invincible and world-wide bulwark) against the Treaty of Versailles and against international imperialism in general.” [21]
The Mandate system was a colonialist system for the super exploitations of the colonies.
The Paris conference exposed among other things the hypocrisy of the US President Wilson’s who acknowledged in January 1918, that the concept of the right of self-determination applied equally to the non-Western part of humanity. In his 14 points program we find: “A free, open-minded and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the Government whose title is to be determined”. [22] Yet in 1919 he supported the mandate colonialist system. [23]
Weitzman declared in 1918 that the aim of the Zionists was to establish only a national home and not a state. He wrote the Foreign Office: “We were prepared to find a certain amount of hostility on the part of the Arabs and Syrians, based largely on misconception of our real aims, and we have always realized that one of our principal duties would be to dispel misconceptions and to endeavor to arrive at an amicable understanding with the non-Jewish elements of the population on the basis of the declared policy of His Majesty’s Government.” [24]
The Military Governor, Colonel (later Sir) Ronald Storrs, commented: “As for Weizmann and Palestine, I entertain no doubt that he is out for a Jewish Government, if not at the moment then in the near future …”… “I feel tolerably sure therefore that while Weizmann may say one thing to you, or while you may mean one thing by a national home, he is out for something quite different. He contemplates a Jewish State, a Jewish nation, a subordinate population of Arabs, etc. ruled by Jews; the Jews in possession of the fat of the land, and directing the Administration.” [25]
At the end of the Ottoman period Palestinians began their resistance to the Zionist colonization The Historian Rashid Khalidi wrote that the fallahin resistance to land evictions by Ottoman authorities and Zionist militias took the form of both armed and unarmed resistance. [26]
One of the first paramilitary Zionist organizations was the Hashomer (“The Watchman”) which was organized in 1909 to defend the first Zionist colonies established by Baron Edmond de Rothschild, against the Arab peasants who were evicted from their villages in order to build the Zionist colonies.
The King-Crane Commission, officially called the 1919 Inter-Allied Commission on Mandates set by Wilson stated: ”The Peace Conference should not shut its eyes to the fact that the anti-Zionist feeling in Palestine and Syria is intense and not lightly to be flouted. No British Officer consulted by the Commissioners believed that the Zionist programme could be carried out except by force of arms. The officers generally thought that a force of not less than 50,000 soldiers would be required even to initiate the programme. That of itself is evidence of a strong sense of the injustice of the Zionist programme, on the part of the non-Jewish populations of Palestine and Syria. Decisions, requiring armies to carry out, are sometimes necessary, but they are surely not gratuitously to be taken in the interests of a serious injustice, for the initial claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a “right” to Palestine, based on an occupation of two thousand years ago, can hardly be seriously considered.” [27]
In the Peace conference in Paris in 1919 the Zionist delegation demanded: “The Hermon is Palestine’s real “Father of Waters,” and cannot be severed from it without striking at the very root of its economic life. The Hermon not only need re-afforestation but also other work before it can again adequately serve as the water reservoir of the country. It must, therefore, be wholly under the control of those who will most willingly as well as most adequately restore it to its maximum utility. Some international arrangement must be made whereby the riparian rights of the people dwelling south of the Litani River may be fully protected, properly cared for, these headwaters can be made to serve in the development of the Lebanon as well as of Palestine. The fertile plains east of the Jordan, since the earliest Biblical times, have been linked economically and politically with the land west of the Jordan. The country, which is now very sparsely populated, in Roman times supported a great population. It could now serve admirably for colonization on a large scale. A just regard for the economic needs of Palestine and Arabia demands that free access to the Hedjaz Railway throughout its length be accorded both Governments. An intensive development of the agriculture and other opportunities of Trans-Jordania make it imperative that Palestine shall have access to the Red Sea and an opportunity of developing good harbors on the Gulf of Akaba. Akaba, it will be recalled, was the terminus of an important trade route of Palestine from the days of Solomon onwards. The ports developed in the Gulf of Akaba should be free ports through which the commerce of the Hinterland may pass on the same principle which guides us in suggesting that free access be given to the Hedjaz Railway.” [28]
Thus the Zionist demanded part of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Israel as it is known occupied the Hermon (Golan Heights) and tried to occupy south Lebanon in the first Lebanon war in 1982.
The Zionist propaganda portrait Crane and King as Anti-Semites: “The well-known anti-Zionist predilections of Crane colored the testimony and made its credibility somewhat doubtful. Any question of his objectivity in Palestine was settled by his admiration for Hitler’s Germany — Crane called the Third Reich “the real political bulwark of Christian culture” — and his approval of Stalin’s anti-Jewish purges in Soviet Russia. His biographer described his later life as dominated by:… a most pronounced prejudice…his unbridled dislike of Jews.” Crane “tried…to persuade …President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to shun the counsels of Felix Frankfurter and to avoid appointing other Jews to government posts.” Crane “envisioned a world-wide attempt on the part of the Jews to stamp out all religious life and felt that only a coalition of Muslims and Roman Catholics would be strong enough to defeat such designs. In 1933 Crane actually proposed to Haj Amin Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, that the Mufti open talks with the Vatican to plan an anti-Jewish campaign.” [29]
A search about King and Crane reviles: “King was one of the best known educators of his time and served as the director of religious work for the YMCA in France. Mr. Crane was selected as part of a special diplomatic mission to Russia and was U.S. Ambassador to China from 1920-1921. In 1919, after World War I and the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, President Woodrow Wilson appointed King and Crane to head the Inter-Allied Commission on Mandates in Turkey… Prior to their journey, King and Crane had been lobbied by pro-Zionist groups and were, by their own admission, “pre-disposed in its favor.” However, during conferences with local Jewish representatives, it became apparent that their goal was the “practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine by various forms of purchase.” [30]
Due to political pressures the report was published only in 1922 after the US Senate and House had passed a joint resolution in favor of establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. Henry King Churchill died in 1934 and there are no indications whatsoever that he harbored Anti-Semitic sentiments. By many accounts Crane was an anti-Semite. However the fact that he supported Hitler does not prove that in 1919 he was a pro- Nazi. His position reflected the wishes of the majority of the population that was an Arab. Furthermore, it is true that the Zionists from the very beginning of their colonization of Palestine wanted to establish a Jewish state in Palestine with a Jewish majority and for this they had to expel the native Palestinians from what they considered their own promised land. So the commission conclusion was right regardless of the shady character of Crane.
The Mandate for Palestine was assigned to Great Britain by the Allies at the San Remo Conference (1920) and endorsed by the League of Nations (1922).
The 1929 Clashes
In August 1929 a very serious clash between Muslims and Jews took place in Jerusalem over the Western Wall.
According to the Zionists propaganda the clashes between the Muslims and the Jews were reflection of Anti-Semitic propaganda initiated by the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin. For example: “Appointed Mufti of Jerusalem by the British in 1921, Haj Amin al-Husseini was the most prominent Arab figure in Palestine during the Mandatory period. Al-Husseini was born in Jerusalem in 1893, and went on to serve in the Ottoman Army during World War I. Anti-British and anti-Jewish, the mufti was the key nationalist figure among Muslims in Palestine. Fearful that increased Jewish immigration to Palestine would damage Arab standing in the area; the mufti engineered the bloody riots against Jewish settlement in 1929 and 1936.” [31]
Once again this is a Zionist propaganda and not the truth. Haj Amin al-Husseini was not Anti British, he was nominated by the British with the recommendations of the Zionists because they trusted him to serve the British. He did not engineer the events of 1929 as can be learned from the British inquiry commissions. In more than one way the actions of the Zionists led to the clashes.
While the Muslim attacks on religious non-Zionist Jews had a reactionary element, the Zionists actions led the Muslims to believe for good reasons that the Zionists wanted to appropriate the Western Wall for themselves, even though it is a holy place for the Muslims and not only for the Jews. The history after 1967 has proven that the Muslims were right.
“The British established an investigation commission known as the Shaw report. The commission’s report was issued in March 1930 and led to the Hope Simpson Enquiry in May 1930. It concluded that the cause of the rioting was based in Arab fears of continual Jewish immigration and land purchases, particularly resonating from a growing Arab landless class. The 1929 Commission addressed two aspects of the disturbances, the immediate nature of the riots and the causes behind them. It criticized the immigration and land-purchase policies that, it said, gave Jews unfair advantages. The commission also recommended that the British take greater care in protecting the Arabs’ rights and It found that the purchase of lands by Jewish constituted a danger to the Arabs’ national survival, since highly productive land was being bought, suggesting that ‘immigrants would not be content to occupy undeveloped areas’, with the consequence that ’the economic pressure upon the Arab population was likely to increase. The conclusions of the Commission, especially regarding the clashes were that the outbreak in Jerusalem on 23 August was from the beginning an attack by Arabs on Jews without an earlier murders by Jews of Arabs. The outbreak was not premeditated. A general massacre of the Jewish community at Hebron was narrowly averted. In a few instances, Jews attacked Arabs and destroyed Arab property. These attacks, though inexcusable, were in most cases in retaliation for wrongs already committed by Arabs in the neighborhoods in which the Jewish attacks occurred. The Mufti was influenced by the twofold desire to confront the Jews and to mobilize Moslem opinion on the issue of the Wailing Wall. He had no intention of utilizing this religious campaign as the means of inciting to disorder. The Mufti, like many others who directly or indirectly played upon public feeling in Palestine, must accept a share in the responsibility for the disturbances. In the matter of innovations of practice of the Jews at the Wailing Wall little blame can be attached to the Mufti in which some Jewish religious authorities also would not have to share. There is no evidence that the Mufti issued any requests to Moslems in Palestine to come up to Jerusalem on 23 August and no connection has been established between the Mufti and the work of those who either are known or are thought to have engaged in agitation or incitement. After the disturbances had broken out, the Mufti co-operated with the Government in their efforts both to restore peace and to prevent the extension of disorder.
However, the claims and demands which from the Zionist side have been advanced to the future of Jewish immigration into Palestine have been such as to arouse among the Arabs the apprehensions that they will in time be deprived of their livelihood and pass under the political domination of the Jews. There is incontestable evidence that in the matter of immigration there has been a serious departure by the Jewish authorities from the doctrine accepted by the Zionist Organization in 1922 that immigration should be regulated by the economic capacity of Palestine to absorb new arrivals. Between 1921 and 1929 there were large sales of land in consequence of which numbers of Arabs were evicted without the provision of other land for their occupation.
The immediate causes of the outbreak were: The long series of incidents connected with the Wailing Wall. These must be regarded as a whole, but the incident among them which contributed most to the outbreak was the Jewish demonstration at the Wailing Wall on 15 August 1929. The Commission recommended that the Government reconsider its policies as to Jewish immigration and land sales to Jews.
The report of Hope Simpson Royal Commission in 1930 stated that the main victims of the rioting were Orthodox Jews, however the Orthodox community took a decision to boycott the Commission Immigration policy should be clearly defined, and its administration reviewed “with the object of preventing a repetition of the excessive immigration of 1925 and 1926” The “tendency towards the eviction of peasant cultivators from the land should be checked.” The long-running dispute between Muslims and Jews over access to the Western Wall in Jerusalem escalated into violence. The riots took the form, in the most part, of attacks by Arabs on Jews accompanied by destruction of Jewish property. 133 Jews were killed by Arabs and 339 others were injured, while 110 Arabs were killed and 232 were injured, The Western Wall is one of the holiest of Jewish sites, sacred because it is a remnant of the ancient wall that once enclosed the Jewish Second Temple. The Jews, through the practice of centuries, had established a right of access to the Wailing Wall for the purposes of their devotions. As part of the Temple Mount the Western Wall was under the control of the Muslim religious trust, the Waqf. Muslims consider the wall to be part of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, and according to Islamic tradition the place where Muhammad tied his horse, Buraq, before his night journey to heaven. There had been a few serious incidents resulting from these differences. As a result of an incident, which occurred in September 1925, a ruling was made which forbade the Jews to bring seats and benches to the Wall even though these were intended for worshippers who were aged and infirm. The Muslims linked any adaptations to the site with “the Zionist project” and feared that they would be the first step in turning the site into a synagogue and taking it over. Several months earlier Zionist leader Menachem Ussishkin gave a speech demanding “a Jewish state without compromises and without concessions, from Dan to Be’er Sheva, from the great sea to the desert, including Transjordan.” He concluded, “Let us swear that the Jewish people will not rest and will not remain silent until its national home is built on our Mt Moriah”, a reference to the Temple Mount. In September 1928, Jews praying at the Wall on Yom Kippur placed chairs and a partition, consisting of a few wooden frames covered with cloth which separated the men and women. Jerusalem’s British commissioner Edward Keith-Roach, while visiting the Muslim religious court overlooking the prayer area, pointed out the screen, mentioning that he had never seen it at the wall before. This precipitated emotional protests and demands from the assembled sheiks that it be removed. Unless it was taken down, they said, they would not be responsible for what happened. The screen was described as violating the Ottoman status quo that forbade Jews from making any “construction” at the Western Wall area and played into Muslim fears of Zionist expropriation of the site, though such screens had been put up from time to time. Keith-Roach told the beadle that the screen had to be removed because of the Arabs’ demands. The beadle requested that the screen remained standing until the end of the prayer service, to which Keith-Roach agreed. When the Jewish beadle failed to remove the screen as agreed, ten armed men were sent in, urged on by Arab residents who were shouting, “Death to the Jewish dogs!” and “Strike, strike”. A violent clash with worshipers took place, and it was destroyed .Zionist literature published throughout the world used the imagery of a domed structure on the Temple Mount to symbolize their national aspirations. Zionists had appropriated an Islamic minaret from the Ottoman period on the old city wall as a symbol for their propaganda. A Zionist flag was depicted atop of a building very reminiscent of the Dome of the Rock in one publication, which was later picked up and redistributed by Arab propagandists. Haj Amin al Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem distributed leaflets to Arabs in Palestine and throughout the Arab world which claimed that the Jews were planning to take over the al-Aqsa Mosque. The leaflet stated that the Government was “responsible for any consequences of any measures which the Moslems may adopt for the purpose of defending the holy Burak themselves in the event of the failure of the Government…to prevent any such intrusion on the part of the Jews.” A memorandum issued by the Moslem Supreme Council stated, “Having realized by bitter experience the unlimited greedy aspirations of the Jews in this respect, Moslems believe that the Jews’ aim is to take possession of the Mosque of Al-Aqsa gradually on the pretense that it is the Temple”, and it advised the Jews “to stop this hostile propaganda which will naturally engender a parallel action in the whole Moslem world, the responsibility for which will rest with the Jews”. Zionists began making demands for control over the wall; some went as far as to call openly for the rebuilding of the Temple, increasing Muslim fears over Zionist intentions. Ben-Gurion said the wall should be “redeemed”, predicting it could be achieved in as little as “another half a year”. During the spring of 1929 the Revisionist newspaper, Doar HaYom ran a long campaign claiming Jewish rights over the wall and its pavement. On 14 August the Haganah and Brit Trumpeldor held a meeting in Tel Aviv attended by 6,000 people objecting to 1928 Commission’s conclusion that the Wall was Muslim property. March to the Western Wall and counter demonstrations On Thursday, 15 August 1929, during the Jewish fast of Tisha B’Av, several hundred members of Joseph Klaussner’s Committee for the Western Wall, among them members of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism movement Beitar youth organization, under the leadership of Jeremiah Halpern, marched to the Western Wall shouting “the Wall is ours”. At the Wall they raised the Jewish national flag and sang Hatikvah, the Jewish anthem. Rumours spread that the youths had attacked local residents and had cursed the name of the Prophet Muhammad. On Friday, 16 August, after an inflammatory sermon, a demonstration organized by the Supreme Muslim Council marched to the Wall. The Acting High Commissioner summoned Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini and informed him that he had never heard of such a demonstration being held at the Wailing Wall, and that it would be a terrible shock to the Jews who regarded the Wall as a place of special sanctity to them. At the Wall, the crowd burnt prayer books, liturgical fixtures and notes of supplication left in the wall’s cracks, and the beadle was injured. The rioting spread to the Jewish commercial area of town. Inflammatory articles calculated to incite disorder appeared in the Arab media and one flyer, signed by “the Committee of the Holy Warriors in Palestine” stated that the Jews had violated the honor of Islam, and declared: “Hearts are in tumult because of these barbaric deeds, and the people began to break out in shouts of ‘war, Jihad … rebellion.’ … O Arab nation, the eyes of your brothers in Palestine are upon you … and they awaken your religious feelings and national zealotry to rise up against the enemy who violated the honor of Islam and raped the women and murdered widows and babies. On the same afternoon, the Jewish newspaper Doar HaYom published an inflammatory leaflet describing the Muslim march, based partially on statements by Wolfgang von Weisl, which “in material particulars was incorrect.” [32]
The Muslims were right to suspect the intention of the Zionists. Israel controls the Al Aqsa and allows supporters of the insane idea of a third temple to enter the courtyard of the Mosque and pray there in spite of the objection of the guardians of the Mosques. In 2013 the Israeli Parliament debated a draft Israeli law granting Jews the right to pray at the al-Aqsa Mosque esplanade – one of the three most holy sites in Islam. Last year the Israeli Magistrate Court in Jerusalem ruled that Jewish settlers can perform prayers at the gates of Al-Aqsa Mosque, On June 9 2016 the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, David Lau, said he would like to see the Jewish temple rebuilt on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. [33]
According to the Zionist Christian Magazine: “The Temple Mount and Land of Israel Faithful Movement are preparing for the construction of the Jewish Third Temple on the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. The stones are being cut according to the description of the Millennial Temple in Ezekiel and artisans also are making the holy objects for placement within the inner areas as proscribed for the operation of daily worship. The Movement sent a letter to the Pope asking him “to return the Holy Temple Menorah, the vessels, and the treasures to Israel without delay.” According to the prophecies of the end times, the Jewish Temple must be rebuilt before the Lord returns. Major events in the final years will revolve around this Temple and Jesus will come back to live within it during the 1,000 year Kingdom Age. Everything is coming together for the Temple’s construction; therefore the time of the end must be drawing near”. [34]
Don Koeing, a temporary Christian Zionist, wrote:
“The survival of the Jews as a race is remarkable. Many times in history the Jews have been slaughtered with the last major slaughter being the holocaust in Germany when one third of the world’s Jews were murdered. In spite of this the Jews survive as a race and religion and many are now back in their land just as was foretold by their prophets.
There will be a final attempt to exterminate the Jews by satanic forces. At that time scripture indicates that two thirds of all the Jews in the land will be killed and one third will be refined through the fire. Satan understands that the promised Messiah is Jewish and by exterminating the Jews he knows the promised Jewish Kingdom on earth can never take place.
It is my theory that Satan wishes for all Jews to return to the land of Israel so that he can finally destroy all of them there in one place. This is why the world United Nations under the authority of Satan allowed the creation of Israel in the first place. However, God has allowed the return of the Jews to His land for other reasons. He will judge the nations there by how they treat the Jews dwelling in His land and then God will restore the kingdom to Israel with Jesus on the throne of David.” [35]
According to the Israeli Arutz 7 from 2015 “The Temple Institute has released a modern three-dimensional architectural rendition of the future Third Holy Temple, utilizing the latest building material and techniques.” [36]
In the last years the right wingers who want to build a synagogue in al Aqsa have come with the following argument: “Early Islamic sources state that the “al Aqsa Mosque” (literal meaning: ‘the farther mosque’), mentioned only once in the Koran, was one of two mosques located near Ji’irrana, a village located between Mecca and Taaf in the Arabian Peninsula (now Saudi Arabia.) One of the mosques was called “al-Masjid al-Adna,” meaning the “closer mosque” and the other ”al-Masjid al-Aqsa”, the “farther mosque.” When the Koran refers to the al Aqsa mosque while telling the myth of the Prophet Muhammad’s night time journey from the “holy mosque” of Mecca to al Aqsa, that is, the “farther mosque,” it is referring to the mosque in Ji’irrana.” [37]
“In 682 C.E., fifty years after Mohammed’s death, Abd allah Ibn al-Zubayr, the tough man of Mecca, rebelled against the Umayyads who ruled Damascus and would not allow them to fulfill the Haj in Mecca. Since the Haj pilgrimage is one of the five basic Islamic commandments, they were forced to choose Jerusalem as their alternative for a pilgrimage site. In order to justify choosing Jerusalem, the Umayyads rewrote the story told in the Koran, moving the al Aqsa mosque to Jerusalem, and adding, for good measure, the myth of the night time journey of Mohammed to al Aqsa. This is the reason the Sunnis now consider Jerusalem their third holiest city.” [38]
Clearly the arrival of Zionists to Palestine, under the protection of the British, the evictions of the Arab peasants and Zionist nationalist propaganda that did not hide the Zionist intentions to appropriate the country led to the Palestinian resistance which was at the same time in a process of forming a nation. The purchases of land by Jews for Zionist settlement which displaced tens of thousands of Palestinian peasants from their homes led to armed struggle. It was Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam, a Syrian who resided in Haifa since 1922, who called for an armed revolt against the British and the Zionists. In 1935 the British killed Al-Qassam. His resistance inspired many Palestinians. By 1936, an Arab rebellion erupted against British imperialism and Zionist settler-colonialism. The best account of the rebellion can be found in Ghassan Kanafani “The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine” who wrote: “Between 1936 and 1939, the Palestinian revolutionary movement suffered a severe setback at the hands of three separate enemies that were to constitute together the principal threat to the nationalist movement in Palestine in all subsequent stages of its struggle: the local reactionary leadership; the regimes in the Arab states surrounding Palestine; and the imperialist-Zionist enemy.”
The reactionary local leadership was led by Haj Amin al Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who represented the landlord aristocracy. They were afraid that they will lose the control over the revolutionary movement of workers and peasants. Haj Amin al Husseini was nominated by the Zionist British High Commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, with the advised of the Zionist leadership who were sure that he will serve the British, and thus the Zionists. Until 1936 the Mufti served two masters in this order: his British employers, and his class. However, when the Arab revolt began in 1936, activists called on him to lead them against Zionism and British rule. As soon as he agreed to lead the revolt, as president of the Arab Higher Committee, he put himself on a collision course with the British government. He had to escape. He escaped to Iraq and participated in the Anti-British revolt in 1941 led by Rashid Ali who had a pro-German orientation. His government was defeated in May 1941 the British and when it was crashed he escaped to Berlin. During the rule of Rashid Ali a massacre of Jews known as the Farhud took place with over 180 lives were lost, but at the same time many Muslims saved Jews.
In Berlin he helped the Nazi regime. The Nazis promised to help the Arab countries liberate themselves from British rule, for which the Mufti helped with anti-British and anti-Jewish propaganda and recruited Muslim volunteers for the war effort.
The Zionists love to use his relations with the Nazi regime for their Anti-Palestinian propaganda while hiding their supporting role for the Third Reich. One example of the Zionist lies about the Mufti is the statement of Benjamin Netanyahu that Hitler did not intend to kill the Jews until the Mufti changed his mind. [39] A relative honest biography of the Mufti can be found in Elpeleg, Z. (Zvi), The grand mufti: Haj Amin al-Hussaini, founder of the Palestinian national movement. [40]
The Arabs Kings, servants of British imperialism, did everything they could to end the uprising for fear of similar uprisings in the Arab countries.
By 1939, the British with the support of the Zionists terrorism had smashed the rebellion. The British shipped over 20,000 troops to Palestine while the Zionists had some 15,000 Jews that helped the British. An estimated 5,000 Arabs were killed in the revolt, 15000 got wounded and another 5600 were imprisoned. [41]
Were the Zionists a national liberation movement and in a different earlier period , they would had joined the Palestinians uprising, as happened for example in Latin America, when the local Spaniard joined the creoles against Spain, but being settler colonialists in the epoch of decay of capitalism they joined the British repression of the Palestinian national liberation struggle.
“In response to the rebellion the British issued a white paper. The white paper of the British government from 1939 was a government policy document, prepared by Secretary of State for the Colonies Malcolm MacDonald and published on 21 May 1939. Following the conclusions of the Peel and Woodhead Commissions and discussions at the St. James Conference, as well as the ongoing Arab Revolt, the paper rejected the idea of partition and suggested the establishment within 10 years of an independent state in Palestine, with Arabs and Jews sharing the government. It also concluded that Jewish immigration to Palestine should be limited by both the country’s economic capacity and the political consequences, bringing the Jewish population to around one-third of the total in five years, after which further immigration would require Arab consent. It further called for restrictions on the purchase of land by Jews that were indeed enacted in 1940.” [42] In other words it clearly opposed a Zionist state even in part of Palestine. Since the Arabs were the majority this paper called for one state with a Jewish minority. By 1939 the Balfour declaration had no legal value at all. This white paper annulled the Balfour Declaration.
The Zionists, that during the Arab rebellion of 1936-9 against the imperialist rule of Britain joined the British repression of the Arab national liberation, began in 1945 a political and a military campaign to prevent the independence of Palestine and the rule of the majority trying to force the British to allow many more Zionist immigrants.
“The Jewish underground groups launched their insurgency against the British on 31 October 1945 with a series of coordinated attacks against the railways, oil refineries, and police boats. The anti-British insurgency continued for nearly two years, in two phases. The first, often referred to as the “United Resistance” phase, lasted from October 1945 to August 1946. During this period, the three groups attempted to coordinate their actions against the British, but political and strategic disagreements precluded a wholly united front. The Haganah used violence as a pressure tactic to persuade the British to change their policy on Jewish immigration into Palestine. So, it limited its attacks mostly to targets related to anti-immigration efforts, such as coastal radar stations and police boats. But it also sabotaged the railway as a way of imposing economic pressure on the British. The Irgun and Stern groups, did not believe that the British would give Palestine to the Jews and thus were determined to force them out.” [43]
These military actions did not turn the Zionists all of a sudden into an anti-imperialist movement as the aim was not to liberate Palestine from the imperialists but to force the British imperialist to give the Zionist minority the control of Palestine and to drive out the native Arab population.
In July 1946, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the location of the British military and civil administration, killing some 91 people, including Britons, Arabs and Jews. Thus long before the Palestinians used the method of terror it was used by the Zionists.
[1] Hyamson, Albert, “British Projects for the Restoration of Jews to Palestine”, American Jewish Historical Society, Publications 26, 1918
[2] Jerry Klinger: Rev. William Hechler & Theodor Herzl. A Zionist debt fulfilled, The Jewish Magazine, April 2011, http://www.jewishmag.co.il/153mag/theodor_herzl_hechler/theodor_herzl_hechler.htm
[3] Joseph M. Hochstein and Ami Isseroff: Zionism and Israel – Biographies, Orde Charles Wingate: “Hayedid”
[4] David Krusch: Christian Zionism, Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/christian-zionism
[5] Middle East Web: Napoleon Bonaparte’s Letter to the Jews, April 20, 1799, http://www.mideastweb.org/napoleon1799.htm
[6] Leon Rosselsson: Theodor Herzl – Visionary Or Antisemite? Jan 23 2019 https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jtlGsNFfTS0J:https://medium.com/%40rosselson/theodor-herzl-visionary-or-antisemite-97bfbe92980+&cd=1&hl=de&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-b-d
[7] The Armenian genocide, http://endgenocide.org/learn/past-genocides/the-armenian-genocide/
[8] Rafi Mann: Herzl’s Public Diplomacy and “the Armenian Question”, Kesher, 40 (2010), pp. 11-20
[9] Zionism and anti-Semitism: Joseph Massad on the sordid historical alliance (E9), 17 November 2017, https://moderaterebels.com/episode-9-show-notes-zionism-anti-semitism-joseph-massad/
[10] Richard Silverstein: Adolf Eichmann: “If I Were a Jew, I’d Be a Fanatical Zionist”, Tikun Olam, May 27, 2016 https://www.richardsilverstein.com/2016/05/27/adolf-eichmann-if-i-were-a-jew-id-be-a-fanatical-zionist/
[11] Benny Morris: Righteous Victims, p. 162
[12] Herzl: An excerpt from “The Jewish State” https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-zionist-vision/
[13] Leon Trotsky: On the Jewish Problem, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/jewish.htm
[14] British Lies To The Arabs In World War I, http://www.worldfuturefund.org/Reports/Imperialism/britainlies.html
[15] https://mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/peace/guide/pages/the%20balfour%20declaration.aspx
[16] John Cornelius: The Hidden History of the Balfour Declaration, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November 2005, p.6
[17] James Edward Renton: The historiography of the Balfour declaration: Toward a multi‐causal framework, Journal of Israeli History, 19 (2), 1998, p. 111
[18] The world Zionist organization http://www.wzo.org.il/index.php?dir=site&page=articles&op=item&cs=3326&category=3040
[19] Vital Statistics: Total Casualties, Arab-Israeli Conflict, Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/total-casualties-arab-israeli-conflict
[20] British Government, British Public Record Office, Cabinet No. 24/24 (August 1917).
[21] V.I.Lenin: Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/
[22] Interpretation of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points by Colonel House, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/doc31.htm
[23] Pitman B. Potter: Origin Of The System Of Mandates Under The League Of Nations, The American Political Science Review November 1922
[24] British Foreign Office No. 371/3398 (1918)
[25] British Foreign Office No. 800/215 (1919)
[26] Rashid Khalidi: Palestinian Identity: The Construction, of Modern National Consciousness, Columbia University Press, 1997; chapter 5
[27] United States Government, op. cit., vol. XII, pp. 780-781. 51/ Ibid., vol. XII, pp. 793
[28] Jewish Virtual Library: State Israel: Zionist Organization Statement on Palestine at the Paris Peace Conference (February 3, 1919), https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/zionist-organization-statement-on-palestine-at-the-paris-peace-conference
[29] Palestine Facts: King Crane Commission of 1919, http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_ww1_king_crane_1919/
[30] Tammy Obeidallah: Untold Story of The King-Crane Commission, 2009, http://www.palestinechronicle.com/untold-story-of-the-king-crane-commission
[31] The Jewish Virtual Library: Haj Amin al-Husseini, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/haj-amin-al-husseini
[32] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Palestine_riots
[33] Sue Surkes: Israel chief rabbi urges rebuilding Jerusalem temple, 9 June 2016, The Times of Israel https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-chief-rabbi-urges-rebuilding-jerusalem-temple/
[34] Israel Preparing to Build Third Temple, End Time Truth, https://endtimestruth.com/israel-preparing-to-build-third-temple/
[35] Don Koenig: Israel the third temple and the coming Jewish holocaust, https://www.thepropheticyears.com/reasons/Jews.htm
[36] Arutz Sheva Staff: Watch: Plans for Third Temple Have Begun, 26/07/2015, http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/198621
[37] Where is the Al Aqsa of the Koran and Where is it Not? https://onej.org/where-is-the-al-aqsa-of-the-koran-and-where-is-it-not/
[38] https://www.israelandstuff.com/another-lie-exposed-the-real-al-aqsa-mosque-is-not-on-the-temple-mount-in-jerusalem
[39] Netanyahu: Hitler Didn’t Want to Exterminate the Jews, Haaretz, Oct 21, 2015
[40] Elpeleg, Z. (Zvi), The grand mufti: Haj Amin al-Hussaini, founder of the Palestinian national movement, London, England; Portland, Or.: Frank Cass, 1992
[41] Palestine facts: Palestine Arab Revolt 1936-39, http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_mandate_riots_1936-39/
[42] British White Paper of 1939 on Palestine (MacDonald White Paper), https://ecf.org.il/issues/issue/955
[43] David A. Jewish: Terrorism and the Modern Middle East, Journal of Conflict Studies 2017 https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/jcs/article/view/10538/11136
V. The Creation of Israel and the Expulsion of the Palestinians
The War of 1948
When the British left Palestine in 1948 a war broke out. [1] The war of 1948 between the Zionist armed forces against the Palestinians and the Arab states was a war not between an imperialist state (Israel was not yet an imperialist state) and colonies or semi-colonies. It was a war between Israel that was a semi-colony built by settlers colonists on one side while the Palestinians who were an oppressed colonized people and the Arab states that were semi-colonies on the other side. For those who use formal logic it was not easy to choose a side. Today most people that support the Palestinians would agree that it was necessary to stand in the war with the Palestinians and the Arab states. However they will have some difficulties to explain why to side with the Arab states that were “ruled” by kings who clearly were serving the British and French imperialist masters.
The argument that many supporters of the Palestinians just cause advance that it was necessary to stand against Israel in the war because Israel was an oppressor settler colonialist society has a flow. When Britain fought against the 13 American colonies in the American war of independence (1775–1783), the progressive and revolutionary part of humanity were on the side of the American settler colonialists even when these colonialists oppressed the native Indians. It was necessary to defend the Indians against the white settlers and to defend the colonialist settlers against the British Empire because the British Empire was the worse enemy. No one can think that the British Empire fought on the side of the Indians. Those who refused to stand with the American colonialist against imperialism did not help the Indians but the “imperialists”. [2]
The question whether to support or oppose Israel in 1948 relates of course to the question: Do Marxists support the right of self-determination for the Israelis?
Only the working class internationalist outlook that sees the unity of the world through the revolutionary perspective of the workers in the unequal but combined parts can offer the theoretical answer to the war of 1948.
The war of 1948 was situated in the epoch of decay of capitalism. [3] In contrast, the American war of independence was the first stage of the democratic revolution that would be completed with the victory of the North against the South in the Civil War of 1861-1865. Israel, even though it has become an imperialist state, never went through nor can it go through a democratic revolution because of the nature of this period and the nature of Zionism. Israel cannot give the Palestinians equal rights because it would not be a state with Jewish majority of citizens any more. It would lose its legitimization for existence and its whole political and military state apparatus would be threatened. It will lose its military function as the front line of the imperialist in the region. It would therefore mean a suicide of Israel which the beast is of course not willing to do. This is the reason why the demand of one democratic state from the river to the sea cannot be achieved without a socialist revolution.
The Zionists Aim in the 1948 War
If Israel was a progressive society and if it was fighting a revolutionary anti-imperialist war in 1948, as the Stalinists claimed at the time, the outcome in the region would be the weakening of the imperialist control over the region. In the real world the opposite happened.
It is sufficient to read the articles, diaries, speeches of the leading Zionists, including the left-wing Zionists, to realize that the Zionists aim in the war of 1948 was to crash and force the Palestinian to flee their homeland. It also demonstrates that the Zionists were made in the same mold of the South African Afrikaners. This becomes evident from the leading Zionists own words. Let us quote first Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leader of the Revisionist Zionists:
“Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in total, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.” [4]
Later Jabotinsky proclaimed the “iron law of every colonizing movement, a law which knows of no exceptions, a law which existed in all times and under all circumstances. If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison on your behalf. Or else – or else, give up your colonization, for without an armed force which will render physically impossible any attempts to destroy or prevent this colonization, colonization is impossible, not “difficult”, not “dangerous” but IMPOSSIBLE! … Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important to build, it is important to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot – or else I am through with playing at colonization.” [5]
Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonization Department, said: “There are some who believe that the non-Jewish population, even in a high percentage, within our borders will be more effectively under our surveillance; and there are some who believe the contrary, i.e., that it is easier to carry out surveillance over the activities of a neighbor than over those of a tenant. [I] tend to support the latter view and have an additional argument (…) the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish (…) with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary.” [6]
David Ben Gurion, future Prime Minister of Israel, already wrote in 1937 in a letter to his son about the Zionist plans for the expulsion of the Palestinian people: “We must expel Arabs and take their places.” [7]
Other quotes from Ben Gurion underline the Zionist expansionist plans: “We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai.” [8]
Yitzhak Rabin reported in his memoirs: “We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?’ Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said ‘Drive them out!” [9]
The small selection of quotes demonstrates unequivocally the reactionary nature of Zionism as it was planning the creation of the Israeli state and the war of expulsion necessary for it.
Stalinism supported Israel’s reactionary war in 1948
At the time of the 1948 war the Stalinists presented the Zionist war as an anti-imperialist war and thus the creation of Israel as a progressive event. In reality it was a victory for the imperialists and a counter-revolutionary event. [10]
Already in 1943 the Palestinian Communist Party (PKP) was moving toward integration within the organized Jewish Yishuv. While opposing partition and calling for an independent democratic state, it increasingly upheld a bi-national vision, based on “the principle of equal rights of Jews and Arabs for free national, economic and cultural development, without artificial interruptions and in mutual cooperation and brotherhood of nation.” [11] This motion toward political support for Zionism caused a split of the PKP and the left wing, that consisted more of Palestinian patriots known as the National Liberation League, emerged in opposition to the motion of the PKP.
Despite their differences, both factions agreed on one core principle of the bi-national approach: the need to treat members of both national groups equally, whether as citizens in a joint state or as members of national collectives enjoying the same rights within a federal state, or as groups entitled to the right of national self-determination.
The Soviet Stalinists recognized the right of self-determination for the Zionists for the first time in May 1947 in a speech delivered by the USSR’s ambassador at the United Nations, Andrei Gromyko:
“It is essential to bear in mind the indisputable fact that the population of Palestine consists of two peoples, the Arabs and the Jews. Both have historical roots in Palestine. Palestine has become the homeland of both these peoples, each of which plays an important part in the economy and the cultural life of the country. (…) Thus, the solution of the Palestine problem by the establishment of a single Arab-Jewish State with equal rights for the Jews and the Arabs may be considered as one of the possibilities and one of the more noteworthy methods for the solution of this complicated problem. Such a solution of the problem of Palestine’s future might be a sound foundation for the peaceful co-existence and co-operation of the Arab and Jewish populations of Palestine, in the interests of both these peoples and to the advantage of the entire Palestine population and of the peace and security of the Near East. (…) “If this plan proved impossible to implement, in view of the deterioration in the relations between the Jews and the Arabs–and it will be very important to know the special committee’s opinion on this question–then it would be necessary to consider the second plan which, like the first, has its supporters in Palestine, and which provides for the partition of Palestine into two independent autonomous States, one Jewish and one Arab.” [12]
It is interesting to read the account of the Stalinists support for the creation of Israel by Norman Berdichevsky, a fanatic supporter of Israel:
“The most famous and colorful personality of the Spanish Republic in exile, the Basque delegate to the Cortes (Spanish Parliament), Dolores Ibarruri, who had gone to the Soviet Union, issued a proclamation in 1948 saluting the new State of Israel and comparing the invading Arab armies to the Fascist uprising that had destroyed the Republic. Just a few months earlier, the hero of the American Left, the great Afro-American folk singer, Paul Robeson had sung in a gala concert in Moscow and electrified the crowd with his rendition of the Yiddish Partisan Fighters Song…”
What this counter-revolutionary did not mention is that while the International Brigades fought the fascists, the Zionists not only condemn the 300 volunteered from Palestine to fight fascism, but they stole Arab lands in what was known as “Tower and stockade” operation during the 1936–39 Arab revolt.
“…The leaders of the Yishuv (Jewish community in Palestine), already in the summer of 1947, intended to purchase arms and sent Dr. Moshe Sneh (the Chief of the European Branch of the Jewish Agency, a leading member of the centrist General Zionist Party who later moved far leftward and became head of the Israeli Communist Party) to Prague in order to improve Jewish defenses. He was surprised by the sympathy towards Zionism and by the interest in arms export on the side of the Czech Government. Sneh met with the Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Clementis, who succeeded the non-Communist and definitely pro-Zionist Jan Masaryk. Sneh and Clementis discussed the possibility of Czech arms provisions for the Jewish state and the Czechs gave their approval.
In January, 1948 Jewish representatives were sent by Ben-Gurion to meet with General Ludvik Svoboda, the Minister of National Defense, and sign the first contract for Czech military aid. Four transport routes were used to Palestine all via Communist countries; a) the Northern route: via Poland and the Baltic Sea, b) the Southern route: via Hungary, Yugoslavia and the Adriatic Sea, c) via Hungary, Romania and the Black Sea, d) by air, via Yugoslavia to Palestine.
At first, a “Skymaster” plane chartered from the U.S. to help in ferrying weapons to Palestine from Europe was forced by the FBI to return to the USA. By the end of May the Israeli Army (IDF) had absorbed about 20,000 Czech rifles, 2,800 machine guns and over 27 million rounds of ammunition. Two weeks later an additional 10,000 rifles, 1,800 machine-guns and 20 million rounds of ammunition arrived. One Czech-Israeli project that alarmed the Western intelligence was the, so called, Czech Brigade, a unit composed of Jewish veterans of “Free Czechoslovakia”, which fought with the British Army during WWII. The Brigade began training in August 1948 at four bases in Czechoslovakia.
Czech assistance to Israel’s military strength comprised a) small arms, b) 84 airplanes –– the outdated Czech built Avia S.199s, Spitfires and Messerschmidts that played a major role in the demoralization of enemy troops; c) military training and technical maintenance. On January 7, 1949, the Israeli air-force, consisting of several Spitfires and Czech built Messerschmidt Bf-109 fighters (transferred secretly from Czech bases to Israel), shot down five British-piloted Spitfires flying for the Egyptian air-force over the Sinai desert causing a major diplomatic embarrassment for the British government.
Even with Czech weapons and Soviet aid, Israel would undoubtedly have been unable to halt the Arab invasion without a massive inflow of manpower. The United States, Canada and Europe provided no more than 3000 volunteers; many of them combat hardened veterans from both the European and Pacific theaters of war plus a few score idealistic youngsters from the Zionist movements with no combat experience or training.
But their numbers were a drop in the bucket compared to more than 200,000 Jewish immigrants from the Soviet dominated countries in Eastern Europe, notably, Poland, Bulgaria (almost 95% of the entire Jewish community) Romania, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the former Baltic States and even the Soviet Union who emigrated to Israel arriving in time to reach the front lines or replenish the depleted ranks of civilian manpower. Without both the arms and manpower sent from the “Socialist Camp”, to aid the nascent Israeli state, it would have been crushed.
In 1947, when Stalin was convinced that the Zionists would evict the British from Palestine, the Party Line turned about face. Following Soviet recognition and aid to Israel in 1948-49, both the Daily Worker and the Yiddish language communist daily in the U.S. Freiheit (Freedom) outdid one another to explain the new party line in that.
“Palestine had become an important settlement of 600,000 souls, having developed a common national economy, a growing national culture and the first elements of Palestinian Jewish statehood and self-government.”
A 1947 CP-USA resolution entitled ‘Work Among the Jewish Masses’ berated the Party’s previous stand and proclaimed that ‘Jewish Marxists have not always displayed a positive attitude to the rights and interests of the Jewish People, to the special needs and problems of our own American Jewish national group and to the interests and rights of the Jewish Community in Palestine.’
The new reality that had been created in Palestine was a “Hebrew nation” that deserved the right to self-determination. Remarkably, the Soviet propaganda machine even praised the far Right underground groups of the Irgun and “Stern Gang” for their campaign of violence against the British authorities.” [13]
As a result the Soviet Union was the first country to legally recognize de jure, the Israeli state. This Stalinist counter-revolutionary policy of giving the Zionist political as well as military support determined the outcome of the war. It enabled Israel to expel most of the Palestinian people from their country while the Zionist robbed their properties. Stalinism – despite its “communist” rhetoric – proved to be a major counter-revolutionary force and an enemy of the international working class and the oppressed masses. It discredited communism for decades in the whole Middle East.
The Palestinian Refugees
In 1947-8 Israel acted to remove most of the Palestinians from their country. According to the Zionist propaganda: “The Palestinians left their homes in 1947-48 for a variety of reasons. Thousands of wealthy Arabs left in anticipation of a war, thousands more responded to Arab leaders’ calls to get out of the way of the advancing armies, a handful were expelled, but most simply fled to avoid being caught in the crossfire of a battle. Had the Arabs accepted the 1947 UN resolution, not a single Palestinian would have become a refugee and an independent Arab state would now exist beside Israel.” [14]
Like on many questions this is a lie in the technique of the big lie which assumes that the more lies a state tells more people will “buy” at least some of the lies.
“In reality “The number of individuals forced to leave their homes during the War of Independence is estimated at 720,000. Most of them settled in refugee camps in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. According to UNRWA, all the descendants of Palestinian refugees are considered refugees, and therefore today they number over five and a half million. Citizenship of another country, for example, Jordan, does not cancel their refugee status. In other words, only the return of the refugees and their descendants to their homes can cancel this status.” [15]
“Arabs who had fled or been driven from their homes in the area that became the state of Israel in 1948-49 had not done so, by and large, on orders from or at the behest of Palestinian or outside Arab leaders, as Israelis were educated to believe”
“Zionist forces committed dozens of massacres against Palestinians during what was called the 1948 “war”. Some of these are well-known and have been published while others are not. Below are some of the details of the most notorious massacres committed at the hands of Haganah and its armed wing, the Palmach, as well as the Stern Gang, the Irgun and other Zionist paramilitaries”
The following are details of the massacres committed by the Zionists:
The Jerusalem Massacre — 1/10/1937
A member of the Irgun Zionist organisation detonated a bomb in the vegetable market near the Damascus (Nablus) Gate in Jerusalem killing dozens of Palestinian civilians and wounding many others.
* The Haifa Massacre — 6/3/1937
Paramilitaries from the Irgun and Lehi Zionist groups bombed a market in Haifa killing 18 Palestinian civilians and wounding 38.
* The Haifa Massacre — 6/7/1938
Zionist Paramilitaries from the Irgun placed two car bombs in a Haifa market killing 21 Palestinian civilians and wounding 52.
* The Jerusalem Massacre — 13/7/1938
10 Palestinian killed and 31 wounded in a massive explosion in the Arab vegetable market in the Old City of Jerusalem.
* The Jerusalem Massacre — 15/7/1938
A member of the Irgun Zionist paramilitaries threw a hand grenade in front of a mosque in Jerusalem as worshippers were walking out. 10 were killed and 30 were wounded.
* The Haifa Massacre — 25/7/1938
A car bomb was planted by the Irgun paramilitaries in an Arab market in Haifa which killed 35 Palestinian civilians and wounded 70.
* The Haifa Massacre — 26/7/1938
A member of Irgun threw a hand grenade in a Haifa market killing 47 Palestinian civilians.
* The Jerusalem Massacre — 26/8/1938
A car bomb placed by the Irgun Zionist paramilitaries exploded in a Jerusalem Arab market killing 34 civilians and wounding 35.
* The Haifa Massacre — 27/3/1939
The Irgun paramilitaries detonated two bombs in Haifa killing 27 Palestinians and wounding 39.
* The Balad Al-Shaykh Massacre — 12/6/1939
The Haganah paramilitaries raided the city of Balad Al-Shaykh capturing 5 residents who they then killed. The city of Balad Al-Shaykh is a Palestinian city located east of Haifa.
* The Haifa Massacre — 19/6/1939
Zionist paramilitaries threw a hand grenade in a Haifa market killing 9 Palestinians and wounding 4.
* The Haifa Massacre — 20/6/1948
78 Palestinians were killed and 24 wounded by a bomb placed inside a vegetable box in a Haifa vegetable market. The Irgun and Lehi paramilitaries were responsible for this.
* The Al Abbasiyah Massacre — 13/12/1947
A group of Irgun members disguised as British soldiers attacked the village of Al Abbasiyah and opened fire on its residents sitting outside a village café. They also bombed a number of their homes and planted several time bombs. Moreover, British soldiers surrounded the village and allowed the killers to escape from the northern side of the village. They killed 7 and severely wounded 7 others, 2 of whom died later including a 5 year old child.
* The Al-Khasas Massacre — 18/12/194
73 Zionists from the “Maayan Baruch” kibbutz attacked and shot 5 Palestinian workers on their way to work. During the attack, one of the Zionists was stabbed and killed prompting the commander of the Palmach third battalion, Moshe Kelman, to order a retaliatory operation to burn the homes and kill the men in Al-Khasas. The Zionist commander’s report notes that 12 were killed, all of whom were women and children.
* The Jerusalem Massacre — 29/12/1947
Irgun paramilitaries threw a barrel full of explosives near Bab al-Amud (Damascus Gate) in Jerusalem which resulted in the death of 14 Palestinians and the wounding 27 others.
* The Jerusalem Massacre — 30/12/1947
Irgun paramilitaries threw a bomb from a speeding car killing 11 Palestinians.
* The Balad Al-Shaykh Massacre — 31/12/1947
A joint force of the first Palmach battalion and a brigade led by Haim Avinoam attacked the Balad Al-Shaykh village killing 60 civilians, according to Zionist sources. Those killed included children, women and the elderly, and dozens of homes were destroyed.
* Al-Sheikh Break Massacre — 31/12/1947
Zionist paramilitaries groups raided the village of Al-Sheikh Break, killing 40 Palestinians.
* The Jaffa Massacre — 4/1/1948
The Zionist Stern Gang threw a bomb in a crowded plaza in Jaffa, killing 15 people and wounding 98.
* The Al-Saraya Massacre — 4/1/1948
On January 4, 1948 the Irgun Zionist paramilitaries placed a car full of explosives near Al-Saraya in Jaffa which destroyed all that surrounded it, killed 30 Palestinians and wounded several others.
* The Semiramis Massacre — 5/1/1948
The Haganah bombed the Semiramis Hotel located in the Katamon neighbourhood in Jerusalem. The hotel collapsed on its guests, all of whom were Palestinians, killing 19 and wounding over 20.
* The Jerusalem Massacre — 7/1/1948
Irgun paramilitaries threw a bomb at the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem, killing 18 civilians and wounding 40 others.
* The Al-Saraya Al-Arabeya Massacre — 8/1/1948
Zionist paramilitaries used a car bomb to kill 70 Palestinian civilians and wound dozens.
* The Ramla Massacre — 15/1/1948
Palmach soldiers and the Haganah bombed one of the Arab neighbourhoods in Ramla.
* The Yazur Massacre — 22/1/1948
Yigael Yadin, a Haganah commander, ordered the Palmach commander, Yigal Allon, to carry out an operation against the village of Yazur. A group from the Palmach attacked a bus near Yazur, wounding the bus driver a several Palestinian passengers. On the same day, another group attacked another bus killing and wounding several people. These attacks by the Palmach and Givati Brigades on Palestinian villages and cars continued for 20 consecutive days while other units detonated bombs near village homes.
Then Haganah paramilitaries decided to attack the village and bomb the ice factory along with two buildings around it. A Haganah group opened fire on the ice factory in the village, while other groups opened fire and used hand grenades on the homes in the village. Moreover, an engineering group bombed the Askandroni building, the ice factory, and killed 15 people.
* The Haifa Massacre — 28/12/1948
Zionist paramilitaries from the Al-Hadar neighbourhood, located at the top of Al-Abbas Street in Haifa, rolled down a barrel filled with explosives destroying homes and killing 20 Arab citizens, as well as wounding 50 others.
* The Tabra Tulkarem Massacre — 10/2/1948
A group of Zionist paramilitaries stopped Palestinian citizens going back to the village of Tabra Tulkarem and opened fire on them, killing 7 and wounding 5 others.
* The Sa’sa’ Massacre — 14/2/1948
A Palmach force raided the village of Sa’sa’ and destroyed 20 inhabited homes, killing 60 villagers, most of whom were women and children.
* The Jerusalem Massacre — 20/2/1948
The Stern Gang stole a British army vehicle, filled it with explosives, and placed it in front of the Al Salam building in Jerusalem. The explosion killed 14 Palestinians and wounded 26.
* The Haifa Masacre — 20/2/1948
Zionist paramilitaries attacked the Palestinian neighbourhoods in Haifa with mortar fire killing 6 and wounding 36 others.
* The Al-Husayniyya Massacre — 13/3/1948
Haganah paramilitaries raided the village of Al-Husayniyya, destroying homes with explosives and killing over 30 families.
* The Abu Kabir Massacre — 31/3/1948
Paramilitaries from Haganah carried out an armed attack on the Abu Kabir neighbourhood in Jaffa. They destroyed homes and killed residents fleeing their homes to seek help.
* The Cairo Train Massacre, Haifa — 31/3/1948
The Stern Gang planted bombs on a Cairo-Haifa train which killed 40 people and wound 60 others on explosion.
* Ramla Massacre — 1/3/1948
Zionist paramilitaries planned and carried out this massacre in March 1948 in a market in the city of Ramla, killing 25 Palestinian civilians.
* The Deir Yassin Massacre — 9/4/1948
A group of 120 from the two Revisionist (“right-wing”) Zionist paramilitaries, the Irgun Zvai Leumi (Irgun) and Lochamei Herut Yisrael (Lehi or Stern Gang) attacked the village of Deir Yassin, accompanied by tanks. About 100–120 of its residents, a great number of whom were women and children, were massacred. The village was a Palestinian Arab town of about 750 located west of Jerusalem. The “massacre” actually occurred in three distinct phases to be discussed below.
On the evening of April 9th, the Irgun leader publicly exaggerated the death toll in order to terrorize Arabs in Palestine. This was near the end of the British Mandate as Arab-Jewish fighting escalated. The 254 figure is almost certainly an exaggeration, but not an Arab exaggeration.
Their top consideration was economic as this was during Abdul Khader al-Husseini’s cutoff of supplies to Jewish West Jerusalem. As attack plans grew, however, they discussed massacring all the villagers or just the males and any other resisters. The purpose was to frighten Palestine’s Arab residents into flight and defeat and to take revenge for attacks and previous atrocities perpetrated against Jewish forces. An order from Irgun Commander-in-Chief Menachem Begin reportedly told them to observe the Geneva Convention. Whether this order was taken seriously or passed along effectively is unclear. It is clear that the night before the attack some were still talking about inflicting large casualties to send a message of fear to the Arabs of Palestine.
* The Qalunya Massacre — 14/4/1948
A force from the Palmach Zionist paramilitary group raided Qalunya, bombed several homes and killed 14 of its residents.
* The Nasir al-Din Massacre — 13/4/1948
A group consisting of forces from the Irgun and Stern Gang in disguise raided the village of Nasir al-Din opening fired on its inhabitants and killing 50 people. On the previous day, both Nasir al-Din and Al-Shaykh Qadumi were attacked and 12 were killed.
* The Tiberias Massacre — 19/4/1948
Zionist paramilitaries bombed a home in Tiberias, killing 14 of its residents.
* The Haifa Massacre — 22/4/1948
Zionist paramilitaries attacked Haifa from Hadar Alkarmel and occupied homes, streets and public buildings killing 50 Palestinians and wounding 200 others. The residents were taken by surprise, so they took their women and children to the marina to move them to the city of Akka during which they were attacked by Zionists paramilitaries who killed 100 civilians and wounded 200 others.
* The Ayn al-Zaytoun Massacre — 4/5/1948
Ayn al-Zaytoun is a Palestinian village on the outskirts of Safed, the population of which was 820. The Jewish writer, Netiva Ben-Yehuda writes in her book “Through the Binding Ropes” about the Ayn al-Zaytoun Massacre saying: “on May 3rd or 4th, 1948, nearly 39 bound prisoners were shot.”
* The Safed Massacre — 13/5/1948
The Haganah slaughtered about 70 young men from Safed, but there are no details about this massacre.
* The Abu Shusha Massacre — 14/5/1948
Zionist paramilitaries committed an ugly massacre in the village of Abu Shusha, killing about 60 of its residents, including men, women, children and the elderly. The massacre ended with the expulsion of all the residents of the village from their homes, which were then gradually demolished.
* The Beit Daras Massacre — 21/5/1948
A Zionist force supported by tanks surrounded the village of Beit Daras and opened fire on it. The people of the village realised the critical situation and decided to endure the fire and defend their homes at any cost, so they urged the women, children and the elderly to leave the village to lessen their losses. The women, children and the elderly headed towards the southern area of the village, and once they reached the outskirts, were met with Zionist gunfire, despite the fact that they were defenceless. A large number of them were killed, and the forces burned down several homes and bombed others.
* The Al-Tantura Massacre — 22/5/1948
This massacre was carried out by the third battalion of the Alexandroni Brigade and the Zionist plan was to attack the village from two sides; the north and south. One brigade was to block the road, while a naval boat blocked the withdraw route by sea. Every attacking unit was provided with a guide from the neighbouring Zikhron Ya’akov settlement, whose residents knew their way around the village, and the brigade leadership kept a reserve unit for emergencies. Al-Tantura did not initiate a battle with the Haganah, but refused their terms, so the attackers took the men to the village graveyard, lined them up, and killed 200–250 of them.” [16]
According to the historian Benny Moris from 1948 to 1956 there were attempts by Palestinians to cross the border to return to their homes and fields. Between 2,700 and 5,000 Palestinians were killed by Israel during this period. [17]
From February of 1948 the Israeli army began systematically depopulating Palestinian communities. On February 15th 1948 all of the residents of the villages of Qisarya, Barrat Qisarya, Khirbat Al-Burj, and Atlit which are near present day Cesarea were forced from their homes. This was the first time during the conflict when villages were completely depopulated. [18]
The practice of depopulating and destroying Palestinian communities was turned into official government policy by “Plan Dalet” which was finalized by the pre-state Jewish leadership in March 1948. It states:
“…operations can be divided into the following categories:
– Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines and 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 forces must be wiped out and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.” [19]
“Israel destroyed 531 villages, 11 urban neighborhoods in cities like Tel-Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem, and stole 78% of historic Palestine as the first step toward seizing it all for exclusive Jewish use. The value of the stolen properties of the Palestinians: lands, houses, orchards, manufactures; fields, books is many hundreds of billions Dollars. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 Article 11 from1948 is calling for the return of the Palestine refugees to their homes. “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.”
Israel refuses to implement the UN resolution on the ground that the refugees are not ready to live peacefully with the Israeli Jews. This is a flimsy argument. The real reason is that the Zionists want an empty land from Palestinians.
The Jewish Refugees
One of the results of the war of 1948 and the ethnic cleansing was a wave of Anti-Jewish feelings in the Arab states. A few days before the endorsement of the voted on the partition plan for Palestine, Heykal Pasha, the Egyptian delegate, warned:
“A million Jews live in peace in Egypt [and other Muslim countries] and enjoy all rights of citizenship. They have no desire to immigrate to Palestine. However, if a Jewish State were established, nobody could prevent disorders. Riots would break out in Palestine, would spread through all the Arab states and might lead to a war between two races.” [20]
“In 1948 the Iraqi government amended the Penal Code of Baghdad, adding Zionism to other forbidden ideologies like communism, whose propagation constituted a punishable offense. Laws in 1950 and 1951 deprived Jews of their Iraqi nationality and their property in Iraq.” [21]
“Prime Minister of Iraq Nuri Sa’id on October 14, 1949, spoke with U.N. officials about the exchange of “100,000 Baghdad Jews and 80,000 other Jews in Iraq for an equivalent number of urban Arab Palestinian refugees.” [22]
This was not an anti-Zionist policy but a reactionary Anti-Jewish one that played into the hands of the Zionists. Israel that refused to allow the Palestinian refugees to return and even to compensate them for their stolen properties demand now $250 billion in compensation from the Arab countries and Iran for assets left by Jews forced to flee after the creation of the State of Israel. Among these states is Morocco. However this is a lie.
”Such a ‘demand’ lacks credibility as we easily recall the different phases of Jewish emigration from Morocco,” the petition says. “Moroccan Jewish emigration to Israel began in 1950 with a quota set by the Israeli authorities at just under 25,000 Moroccan Jews a year spreading these lies will only serve hatred and extremism,” concludes the petition. Speaking with Morocco World News, Moroccan-French activist Jacob Cohen criticized Israel’s request, describing it as “cynical.” Cohen said that it was the Israeli intelligence service, known as the Mossad that sent Jewish Moroccans to Israel. In 2017, the founder and chairman of the World Federation of Moroccan Jewry, Sam Ben-Shitrit, send a letter to Israeli Minister for Social Equality Gila Gamliel: “We want to state in the clearest way that the Moroccan authorities, for centuries, never expelled the Jews nor confiscated their individual or community property.” [23]
“In Iraq on March 19, 1950, a bomb exploded in the American Cultural Center and Library frequented by Jews in Bagdad. On April 8, 1950 a bomb was thrown at the Jews into El-Dar El-Bida Café, where Jews were celebrating the Passover and four of them were injured. On June 3, 1950 grenade exploded harmlessly in the Jewish area El-Batawin. On June 5, another Jewish building was damaged without causalities by a bomb explosion on El_Rasjid Street. On January 14, 1951 a high-voltage cable damaged by a grenade killed three Jews outside Masouda Shem-Tov Synagogue. These terrorist acts pushed the Jews to leave Iraq. An Iraqi Jew Naim Gilad believes that these actions were the work of a Zionist organization. Standing by itself this can be an imaginary concept. However, Wilbur Crane Eveland, CIA agent stated in 1988 that: “In an attempt to portray the Iraqis as anti-American and to terrorize the Jews, the Zionists planted bombs in the U.S. Information Service library and in the synagogues. Soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel. The Iraqi police later provided our embassy with evidence to show that the synagogue and library bombings, as well as the anti-Jewish and anti-American leaflet campaigns, had been the work of an underground Zionist organization, most of the world believed reports that Arab terrorism had motivated the flight of the Iraqi Jews whom the Zionists had “rescued” really just in order to increase Israel’s Jewish population.” [24]
Why would a senior officer of the CIA tell such a story when the CIA is friendly to Israel unless it is true?! That this can be the truth we can learn from what is known in Israel as the Lavon Affair. It was a failed Israeli covert operation in Egypt known as Operation Susannah. Israeli military intelligence bombed Egyptian, American and British-owned targets in Egypt in the summer of 1954. After the failure Israeli defense minister Pinhas Lavon, was forced to resign. Israel admitted responsibility in 2005 when Israeli President Moshe Katzav honored the nine Egyptian Jewish agents who were involved in the bombing. It is the same pattern as in Iraq. For this reason it is possible to believe Naim who wrote that it was Ben Porat who influenced Nuri, the P.M of Iraq, to pass the Anti-Jewish laws to force Iraqi Jews to immigrate to Israel that was in need of cheap labor after it expelled most Arab Palestinians. Altogether around 850,000 Jews from the Arab countries were uprooted and expelled to Israel.
[1] For an extensive analysis of the 1948 war and its background from a Marxist point of view see e.g. Yossi Schwartz: Israel’s War of 1948 and the Degeneration of the Fourth International, http://the-isleague.com/1948-war-5-2013/ and https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/israel-s-war-of-1948/
[2] For a Marxist analysis of such complicated scenarios of wars see e.g. Yossi Schwartz: Marxism and War, 30.1.2018, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/marxism-and-war/; Michael Pröbsting: World Perspectives 2018: A World Pregnant with Wars and Popular Uprisings. Theses on the World Situation, the Perspectives for Class Struggle and the Tasks of Revolutionaries (Chapter II), RCIT Books, Vienna 2018, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/world-perspectives-2018/; Michael Pröbsting: Dialectics and Wars in the Present Period. Preface to Rudolf Klement’s Principles and Tactics in War, June 2017, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/dialectics-war/; Michael Pröbsting: Liberation Struggles and Imperialist Interference. The failure of sectarian “anti-imperialism” in the West: Some general considerations from the Marxist point of view and the example of the democratic revolution in Libya in 2011”, in: RCIT: Revolutionary Communism, No. 5; http://www.thecommunists.net/theory/liberation-struggle-and-imperialism; Rudolf Klement: Principles and Tactics in War (1938); in The New International (Theoretical journal of the Socialist Workers Party, US-American section of the Fourth International), May 1938, Vol. 4, No. 5, pp. 144-145, https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backiss/vol1/no1/printact.html
[3] For an analysis of the decay of capitalism see e.g. Michael Pröbsting: The Catastrophic Failure of the Theory of “Catastrophism”. On the Marxist Theory of Capitalist Breakdown and its Misinterpretation by the Partido Obrero (Argentina) and its “Coordinating Committee for the Refoundation of the Fourth International”, RCIT Pamphlet, May 2018, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/the-catastrophic-failure-of-the-theory-of-catastrophism/; RCIT: Advancing Counterrevolution and Acceleration of Class Contradictions Mark the Opening of a New Political Phase. Theses on the World Situation, the Perspectives for Class Struggle and the Tasks of Revolutionaries (January 2016), Chapter II and III, in: Revolutionary Communism No. 46, http://www.thecommunists.net/theory/world-perspectives-2016/; Michael Pröbsting: World Perspectives 2018: A World Pregnant with Wars and Popular Uprisings. Theses on the World Situation, the Perspectives for Class Struggle and the Tasks of Revolutionaries, RCIT Books, Vienna 2018, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/world-perspectives-2018/; Michael Pröbsting: The Great Robbery of the South. Continuity and Changes in the Super-Exploitation of the Semi-Colonial World by Monopoly Capital. Consequences for the Marxist Theory of Imperialism, RCIT Books, Vienna 2013, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/great-robbery-of-the-south/; Michael Pröbsting: Imperialism, Globalization and the Decline of Capitalism (2008), in: Richard Brenner, Michael Pröbsting, Keith Spencer: The Credit Crunch – A Marxist Analysis, London 2008, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/imperialism-and-globalization/
[4] Vladimir Jabotinsky: The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs), 1923; reprinted in Lenni Brenner: The Iron Wall. Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir, London 1984, p. 148
[5] Vladimir Jabotinsky: The Iron Law, Selected Writings (South Africa); quoted in Lenni Brenner: The Iron Wall. Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir, London 1984, p. 56
[6] Quoted in Uri Davis: From Israel: an Apartheid State, p.5
[7] Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos, written on 5 October 1937, Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew, and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies, Beirut
[8] David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben- Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978
[9] Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979; quoted in Steven A. Glazer: The Palestinian Exodus in 1948, in: Journal of Palestine Studies (JPS), Volume 9, Issue 4, 1980, p. 103
[10] For a Marxist analysis of Stalinism we refer readers to Leon Trotsky: The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Pathfinder Press 1972. The RCIT’s analysis is summarized in chapter II in our book Michael Pröbsting: Cuba‘s Revolution Sold Out? The Road from Revolution to the Restoration of Capitalism, Vienna 2013, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/cuba-s-revolution-sold-out/. See also Yossi Schwartz: Was the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen a Deformed Workers State? August 2015, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/south-yemen/; Michael Pröbsting: Anti-Imperialism in the Age of Great Power Rivalry. The Factors behind the Accelerating Rivalry between the U.S., China, Russia, EU and Japan. A Critique of the Left’s Analysis and an Outline of the Marxist Perspective, RCIT Books, January 2019, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/anti-imperialism-in-the-age-of-great-power-rivalry/; see also LRCI: The Degenerated Revolution: The Origin and Nature of the Stalinist States, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/stalinism-and-the-degeneration-of-the-revolution/.
[11] Quoted in Ran Greenstein: Class, Nation and Political Organization: The Anti-Zionist Left in Israel/Palestine, in: International Labor and Working-Class History No. 75, Spring 2009, p. 93
[12] UN Debate Regarding the Special Committee on Palestine: Gromyko Statement at UN 1947, May 14, 1947, MidEast Web Historical Documents, http://www.mideastweb.org/gromyko1947.htm
[13] Norman Berdichevsky: Who did what for Israel in 1948? America did nothing, https://www.newenglishreview.org/Norman_Berdichevsky/Israel%3A_From_Darling_of_the_Left_to_Pariah_State/
[14] Mitchell Bard: The Palestinian Refugees: History & Overview, The Exodus of 1947-48, (Updated August 2015), https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/history-and-overview-of-the-palestinian-refugees; Benny Morris: For the record, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jan/14/israel
[15] The Institute for National Security Studies, Tel Aviv University, http://www.inss.org.il/publication/palestinian-refugees-facts-figures-significance/
[16] Notorious massacres of Palestinians between 1937 & 1948 FACT SHEET, https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:IFIHdBBz2n0J:https://medium.com/%40thepalestineproject/notorious-massacres-of-palestinians-between-1937-1948-ae4f4d1f61d0+&cd=1&hl=de&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-b-d
[17] Benny Morris (1997): Israel’s Border Wars, 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War. Clarendon Press, https://books.google.co.il/books?id=YUthqHRF-m8C&redir_esc=y
[18] Pappe, Ilan: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
[19] Ibid
[20] U.N. General Assembly, Second Session, Official Records, Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question, Summary Records of Meetings, Lake Success, N.Y., Sept. 25-Nov. 15, 1947, p. 185
[21] Cohen, Jews of the Middle East, pp. 29-35
[22] Telegram from the American embassy in Baghdad to Washington, D.C., Oct. 15, 1949
[23] Morocco World News January 2019, https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2019/01/264518/morocco-petition-israel-compensation/
[24] Wilbur Crane Eveland, “Ropes of Sand: America’s Failure in the Middle East” N.Y. Norton, 1980, pp. 48-49
VI. Israel as a Colonial Settler State and the Palestinians’ Resistance
Note of the Editorial Board: The following chapter contains one map. For technical reasons these can only be viewed in the pdf version of the book which can be downloaded here.
The Military Regime
Following the war of 1948 and until the eve of the war of 1967 the Palestinians citizens of Israel lived under a military regime and in fact under military occupation. Palestinians faced restrictions on the freedom of movement, restrictions on the freedom of press and opinion and legal confiscation of land and property. Under military law Palestinians faced the possibility of deportations, illegal detentions without trial, curfews, house arrests etc. The end of military rule in 1966 did not end this discrimination that has continued in the 1967 occupied lands.
During the 1956 war, a curfew was imposed on the villages near the border. This was known for the local population. Isshachar Shadmi, an Israeli battalion commander, decided to move the curfew time earlier. 50 of the villages residents, who were working at the neighboring Petah Tekva, got massacred on their way home after a day of work because they were “breaking” a curfew they weren’t aware of.
In the aftermath, some soldiers who were involved went to prison (all of them got pardoned in a year), and the commander was fined 10 prutot (1/100 Israeli pound). The only crime he was convicted of was exceeding his authority by changing the curfew start time. That was the worth of Arab lives in Israel. During the trial of the soldiers one of them testified:
“Malinki also said that in response to his question: “What will be the fate of the civilians who return to the village after the curfew [takes effect],” Shadmi said: “I don’t want sentimentality; I don’t want detainees.” When Malinki persisted in his request to receive a straight answer, he claimed that Shadmi said, “Allah Yerhamu” – Arabic for “God have mercy [on their souls].”
Before he died at age of 96 Shadami told the historian Adam Raz, who published the Hebrew language book “Kafr Qasem Massacre: A Political Biography”, that the 1958 court case against him was nothing more than a show trial, staged in order to keep Israel’s security and political elite – including Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan, and GOC Central Command (and later chief of staff) Tzvi Tzur – from having to take responsibility for the massacre.
Shadmi told that the trial, in which he was initially accused of murder but later acquitted, was intended to mislead the international community with regard to Israel’s ostensible pursuit of justice. Raz is convinced that the background to ostensibly staging the trial was pressure from above to conceal “Operation Mole” (Hafarperet), a secret program to expel to Jordan the population of the so-called Triangle of Arab towns, located southeast of Haifa – details of which have never been revealed.
In a meeting of the cabinet on November 23, 1958, about a month before the opening of Shadmi’s trial, Ben-Gurion was already predicting, “From talking with Shadmi, I assume that he will not say that he received an order like that, that one needs to fire…. Tzur isn’t on trial. Shadmi won’t say such a thing.”
Shadmi also noted that his father, who until 1958 was president of the Military Court of Appeals, was a friend of Shamgar’s: (later on a Supreme Court Judge) “Shamgar told my father ‘Explain to your son that they aren’t out to get him, but want to protect the IDF.”
According to Shadmi, Ben-Gurion, by means of his underlings, made sure that the military judges appointed to conduct the trial would be among those who had been under Tzur’s command in the Givati Brigade, so they would not exactly feel comfortable incriminating him. “They were not chosen by chance,” Shadmi told. And in their outlooks and political positions, they were aligned with the same party of which Ben-Gurion was an admired leader.
Shadmi thought that his trial was intended to prevent the case from reaching the International Court of Justice, which had been established by the United Nations in The Hague following World War II. “They explained to me that they needed to put me on trial, because if I had tried in my own country and convicted, even if I was fined only a penny, I wouldn’t go to The Hague…. If they didn’t prosecute me I would be tried at The Hague. And that is something that neither I nor the country were interested in.”
In 1986, in an article by Dalia Karpel in the Tel Aviv weekly Ha’ir, Malinki’s widow was quoted as saying: “Part of the trial was conducted behind closed doors and it was clear that it was impossible to go up the chain of command looking for responsible parties, and to reveal the part of the GOC Central Command, chief of staff or even the government in this affair. It would mar the image of the state in the world. Ben-Gurion told my husband: ‘I am asking for a human sacrifice on behalf of the state, just as there are sacrificial casualties, people who fall in war. I promise you that your status and rank will be returned to you.”
On the basis of testimonies, written and recorded, that he gathered, Raz is convinced of Shadmi’s version of events, according to which the whole trial was fixed is true “Ben-Gurion sought an insurance policy that would enable him to point to Shadmi as the one who gave the order, and to stop there…. Shadmi would be prosecuted because Ben-Gurion and his colleagues needed to prove to the public and the political establishment that the chain of command led no further than the brigade commander. And in the end, as noted, [Shadmi] was also exonerated.” [1]
The War of 1956
In July 1956 the President of Egypt Gamal Abdul Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. This angered the British imperialists who considered the canal their imperial property. French imperialists were angered by the support Nasser gave to the Algerian national liberation movement. For Israel it was a chance to expend and control Sinai. However under the US and the Soviet Union pressure Israel had to return Sinai until 1967. At that time Nasser was considered by the USA as a potential ally.
The War of 1967
The “Six-Day war” was launched by Israel was a pre-planned war aiming of bringing Nasser down and occupying the West Bank. [2] Years before the war Israel sought to provoke the Arabs to give Israel a cause to attack. In 1966 the Israeli army attacked the West Bank village of destroyed 125 houses, and killed eighteen Jordanian soldiers. In April 1967, Israel downed 6 Syrian MIGs. On June 4th Egypt’s vice president was due in Washington for talks on the status of the Straits of Tiran, the alleged casus belli of the war.
Ben-Gurion, who opposed the plans to occupy the West bank and add more than one and a Half million Palestinians, was ousted in 1963. In that year, the preparations for a possible occupation of both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were stepped up. Over the next four years, the army prepared detailed plans for the eventual takeover of these territories.
Legal plans that were drafted from 1963 onwards detailing how to rule the lives of millions of Palestinians: military judges in waiting, legal advisors, military governors and rulers and a firm legal infrastructure to run life from the very moment of occupation. Intelligence on possible resistance and its leaders were properly gathered so that a swift takeover would evolve from the outset of the occupation.
“Though it is not widely known, the legal status of the West Bank was decided by 1963.” [3] It was decided to use the Hague convention and not the Geneva Convention after the occupation. The Geneva Convention restricts the rights of the occupier because it is from 1949 and based on the experience of WWII and not from 1908.
On the eve of the war, fifty left-wing bourgeois intellectuals around Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir declared that the actions of the state of Israel demonstrated to the world that it only wanted peace. These intellectuals parroted the Israeli lie after the war that Israel had to fight to save itself from destruction at the hands of the Arab states that were acting with the advice and full support of the USSR. During Stalin’s lifetime, the same Sartre was busy covering up the crimes of the dictator. However, being a smart intellectual he was one of the first rats to abandon the sinking ship and to change his masters.
The official Israeli line is that Syria wanted to force Egypt to stand on its side while it provoked the Israeli state, and it was this that led Nasser to send two divisions to Sinai in the middle of May 1967. One thing led to another and two days later, Nasser, preparing for war, demanded the withdrawal of the UN observers (UNEF) that had been stationed in Gaza and Sharam-el-Sheikh since the end of 1956.The final straw, the casus belli, according to this version of events, was the closure of the Tiran Straits, a life line for Israel’s economic survival. This was followed by Nasser’s declaration that Egypt would not allow ships carrying Israeli flags to reach Aqaba Bay. Everyone was reminded of when Israel had been forced to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula after 1956, and Ben Gurion had stated that Israel would have the freedom of navigation through the same Straits.
The statements made in Syria and Cairo gave credibility to the Israeli claim that the Arabs wanted to destroy it. In 1965 and 1966, Nasser’s rhetoric became increasingly more aggressive: “We shall not enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand,” he said on March 8, 1965. “We shall enter it with its soil saturated in blood.” [4]
When the war began, Moshe Dayan, the new Minister of Defense told the Israeli soldiers: “We do not want to conquer, only to prevent the Arabs from conquering us. The Arabs are many and strong but we are a stubborn small nation ready to fight to save ourselves.”
Israeli leaders spoke the truth – but only after the war. What the Israeli government and the official propaganda machine did not tell the public, but after the war admitted, was that Israel provoked Syria time and time again and decided to open a war with the knowledge that it would win within a few days.
Yitzak Rabin himself said after the war: “I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to the Sinai would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive war. He knew it and we knew it.” [5]
General Ezer Weitzman, the former Commander of the Air Force and late President of Israel stated that there was no threat of destruction from Israel’s neighbors, but that war with Egypt, Jordan and Syria was justified so that Israel could “exist according the scale, spirit, and quality she now embodies.”
Menachem Begin later stated that, “In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.” [6]
Why war?
The question of the Tiran Straits was no more than a red herring. The Straits were inside the territorial waters of Egypt. Egypt and Israel were enemies, and no state would allow its enemies to pass through its territory.
Before the war, the Israeli government was divided. On one hand the Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol and the National Religious Party (NRP) wanted to open the war. However, they only wanted war if the US would commit itself to aid Israel, or at least give the green light. On the other hand, and in particular, the Generals wanted to begin the war immediately. On the question of the Tiran Straits, the Israeli historian Tom Segev wrote that the leader of the NRP, Moshe Shapira, was opposed to the war because of the Straits. Rabin tried to change his mind. “’Explain to me, just explain to me,” he said to Rabin, “do you really think the Eshkol-Rabin team should be bolder, more courageous, than the Ben-Gurion-Dayan team was? Why? The Straits were closed until 1956—did it threaten Israel’s security? It did not!’” [7]
The immediate causes of friction between Israel and Syria were the result of disputes about fishing rights in Lake Tiberias, Israeli incursions into the demilitarized zone that had been established after the 1948 war, the guerrilla and terrorist attacks of Fatah, and the Israeli development of a water project involving the Jordan River. The long terms reasons were the Israeli decision to become the powerhouse of the region, to transform the growing class struggle into a chauvinist war and to expand its territory and control over cheap labor and markets.
Israel entered into an economic slowdown in 1966. The slowdown was obscured by elections later in that year. However, by 1967 it was very clear. The recession began in Israel’s large construction industry, and soon many business connected to this industry went bankrupt. There was a sharp decline in investment. Investment in construction fell by 30% and in industry by 20%. This was followed by a sharp rise in prices and a lack of money in the hands of the working class and consumers.
In 1964, the amount of money Germany had agreed to pay to the state of Israel in compensation for the crimes of the Nazis was reduced. The Israeli government itself, which until 1966 had built many large-scale projects, stopped coming up with new ones. The government also denounced workers who demanded pay raises and praised a group of professors who agreed to accept lower wages.
At that time a common joke in Israel was: “The last one to leave please put out the lights“. The rulers of Israel faced opposition of the workers. To prevent the sharpening of the class struggle they used an ages old trick – they turned the unrest into a war. In addition, they understood that winning this war would turn Israel into a major force and the most important strategic asset of the US in the region. It would also provide Israel with other benefits. The war would expand its borders and gain the ruling would gain new sources of cheap labor and new markets.
A genuine revolutionary workers’ state in Egypt would have turned to the Israeli working class and exposed the real aims of the Israeli government, explaining that it was plotting not only against the Arabs but against the Israeli working class itself. This would have created a chance of turning a section of the Israel Jewish workers away from Zionism. This however, was beyond the capacity of the left-wing Bonapartist regime such as Nasser’s. In fact, Nasser’s propaganda turned out to be very useful for the Israeli government.
Alone in the war?
Israel wanted to go to war but not alone. Lyndon B. Johnson had already moved the US Sixth Fleet to the eastern Mediterranean. On May 23, while declaring an embargo on the shipment of arms to the area, Johnson secretly authorized the air shipment of important spare parts, ammunition, bomb fuses, and armored personnel carriers to Israel. [8] The first major U.S. arms agreement with Israel was in 1966. It involved A-4 Skyhawk planes and Sherman tanks, and was worth more than all other U.S. arms supplied since 1948.
The Eshkol government tried to secure France’s support. On May 24, the Foreign Minister of Israel, Aba Eban arrived at the Elysee Palace and was received by President de Gaulle who told Eban: “Ne faites pas la guerre” (Do not go to war), and warned him not to shoot first. On that same day, at Number 10 Downing Street, Prime Minister Harold Wilson invited Eban to attend a cabinet meeting. The reply of the British government was that it would act to open the Straits if there were agreement with other nations, but advised Israel not to act alone.”
Eban’s next stop was Washington on May 27. He had a telegram with him from Prime Minister Eshkol informing the US government that the Arab states intended to attack Israel immediately. The information Dean Rusk had from US intelligence sources was that there were no signs that the Arab states wanted to launch an offensive. In the meeting with Johnson, the US President, who did not want to be involved in two wars at the same time in Vietnam and in the Middle East told Eban, “Israel should get the other maritime powers on its side. Any participation of the USA will need the approval of Congress. We do not believe that the Arabs are about to attack Israel, and if they do you will win within seven days. You are not in danger.” After Eban left, Johnson turned to Walt Rostow and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and told them, “I have failed. They are going to go to war.”
In the report of his recent trips Eban told the Israeli cabinet that President Johnson had promised that the US would take all the necessary measures to open the Straits. This however, was not true. Prime Minister Eshkol even sent a letter of gratitude to Johnson for this promise. Washington replied that the US government had made no such promise. Eshkol hesitated. Even Ben Gurion advised him not to launch a war without the support of the imperialist powers.
“Ben Gurion thought that the crisis with Egypt was the result of the unbalanced actions of Eshkol. In November 1966, Eshekol ordered the attack on Samoa, a village in Jordan, in retaliation for the terrorists who entered Israel from this village. He was very critical of the escalation with Syria after Israel sent 80 warplanes that flew over Damascus.” [9] Ben Gurion was even angry with General Rabin and shouted at him saying, “You have brought the state to a most dangerous situation, and you are to be blamed for it”.
Rabin, as is known, later had a nervous breakdown because he knew that Ben Gurion could have been right. However, some of the generals, including Ariel Sharon, who wanted to launch the war without delay, were planning a military coup to replace Eshkol, whose hesitation grew after he received a message from Kosygin, the President of the USSR, who urged him not to go to war. Clearly, the President of the Soviet Union was trying to prevent the war at the last minute, once it had become clear that Israel intended to go to war.
On May 30, Meir Amit, the head of Mossad, visited McNamara after a visit to the Chief of the CIA, Richard Helms. From Helms he learned that the US would not send an armada to open the Straits. He told McNamara the Secretary of Defense that “we want three things from you. One, that you refill our arsenal after the war. Two, that you help us in the United Nations. Three, that you isolate the Russians in the area.” McNamara replied, “I hear you loud and clear.” He then asked how long it would take Israel to defeat the Egyptians. Amit replied, “One week.” Amit added, “I am going home and recommend that we open the war.” In his report to the President, McNamara told him that the Israelis were going to attack. No one was surprised, as everyone knew that he was in favor of Israel striking first.
This was the green light that the Israeli government had been waiting for. On June 5th, 1967 the war began. After the start of the war, the United States vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for Israel to return to its pre-war boundaries, and Johnson refused to criticize Israel for starting the war.
It is possible that the US was more involved in the war than it admitted. Stephen Green has written that pilots of the U.S. Air Force’s 38th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron flew RF-4Cs with the white Star of David and Israeli Air Force tail numbers painted on them over bombed air bases in Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in order to take pictures for the Israelis. He contends that they flew 8 to 10 such missions a day during the course of the war. When the air power of Israel’s enemies was destroyed, the RF-4C missions were changed to tracking the movement of Arab troops so that the Israelis could bomb them the next morning. In the end none of these missions proved decisive in the war. However, the Arabs did accuse the United States of providing tactical air support, which apparently was untrue. In response, President Johnson declared publicly that the US had provided no assistance of any kind to Israel. [10]
The “Miracle”
The Israeli government claimed that a miracle happened. Like all kinds of such miracles, this one was a fake. A strong and modern capitalist state on its way to becoming a regional imperialist power destroyed the weaker Arab armies within six days. Israel had already won the war on the first day when it destroyed the Egyptian Air Force.
Early in the morning of July 5, 200 Israeli jets attacked the Egyptian airfields in Sinai and destroyed the entire air force. Within three days the Israeli army had defeated the armies of Egypt and Jordan and had captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. The rest of the war was only a question how far and wide Israel would expand before international pressure forced them to halt their advance.
On June 8, Egypt, having lost the Sinai to Israel, accepted the UN-proposed cease-fire. Syria accepted it the following day, however Israel launched an additional offensive and conquered the Golan heights.
On June 8 another myth was created by the state of Israel and its friends. On that day, Israeli war planes and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty, an intelligence gathering ship, while it was on a surveillance mission off the shores of El Arish, in the Sinai Peninsula. 34 Americans died and 171 were injured. Israel claimed that it mistook the Liberty for an enemy vessel. US governments have since backed up this story. In 1999, a National Security Agency report from 1981 was released claiming that, “the tragedy resulted not only from Israeli miscalculation but also from faulty U.S. communications practices.” Since July 2003, this report has been available on the website of the National Security Website.
However, this “conclusion” has been disputed. In 1976, James Ennes, a survivor of the attack on the Liberty, argued in his book “Assault on the Liberty” that Israel was actually planning a surprise attack on Syria and was worried about the interference of the United States. The bombing of the Liberty was an attempt to disrupt the ability of the US to gather intelligence about the plan. This argument was presented in a History Channel production that aired in 2001 called “Cover Up: Attack on the USS Liberty”. Another writer, James Bamford, in his 2000 book “Body of Secrets“, argued that Israel attacked the ship because it was worried that the Liberty would learn of the killing of hundreds of Egyptian POWs by the Israeli army that had taken place nearby. (Ret.) Admiral Thomas Moorer, a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a leader in the effort to expose the cover-ups of the attack, stated in a press conference on October 22, 2003 that Israel planned to sink the ship and then implicate Egypt, thereby pushing the U.S. to fight on the side of Israel.
At the same press conference, Capt. Ward Boston, a retired Navy lawyer and counsel to the Court of Inquiry in the Navy’s investigation into the case released a statement, in which he declared: “I am outraged at the efforts of the apologists for Israel in this country to claim that this attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity.” Boston also said that officials in the White House at that time had ordered investigators to conclude “that the attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity'”.
Boston also said that he was told by Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, who served as president of the Court of Inquiry, that he had been forced to find that the attack was unintentional.
Was it at all possible that Israel attacked an American ship? The history of Israel shows that it was possible. In 1954 Israel carried out terrorist attacks on Egyptian, British, and American institutes. In Israel it is called “the bad business” or the “Lavon Affair” (Lavon was the Minister of Defense at the time). The idea was to create a conflict between Egypt and the US. The group responsible was caught after a small explosive exploded in the pocket of one its members while trying to carry out a bombing mission in a cinema.
Israel and its supporters presented the war as a great event and a monumental achievement. Once again David had defeated Goliath. In reality, it was a reactionary war on the part of the Israeli rulers with the blessing of US imperialism. It derailed the class struggle in Israel and strengthened the most reactionary sections of Israeli society. It created the reactionary Gush Emunim, the fanatical settlers’ movement. It would also bring Begin’s right-wing government to power in 1977 and would later on usher in Sharon the butcher.
On the Egyptian side, the war would bring down Nasserism and replace it with the reactionary regime of Sadat, who was followed by Mubarak. These regimes turned Egypt into a bastion of reaction in the region.
For the Palestinians the war meant the occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. This was to prove a vicious and bloody trap for both the Israeli and Palestinian people, the main victims of the 40-year cycle of violence and bloodshed.
The victory of Israel has pushed the Israeli Jewish population further to the right and opened the road for Israel to become an apartheid state from the river to the sea.
The War of 1973
On October 6 the 1973 war began. In 1972, Sadat expelled 20,000 Soviet advisers from Egypt and opened new diplomatic channels with Washington. To excuse this turn which will lead to the peace agreement in 1978 with Israel it was necessary for Egypt to win some battles. The United States made Israel to promise not to response for at least 48 hours. Israel was informed by Jordan of Sadat plans to attack but was “caught by surprise” blaming the failure of the security intelligence. Thus the US plans were to allow some Egyptian victories before repelling them. The peace with the Egyptian ruling class would open the road to Israel war on Lebanon in 1982 while Egypt did not intervene.
The PLO
The Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO, was founded in 1964 in Cairo, Egypt. Only after the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War of 1967, the PLO became an independent organization with the aim of liberating Palestine. In 1969, Yasser Arafat became Chairman of the PLO’s Executive Committee, until his death in 2004. The PLO in its first years used guerrilla and terrorist actions. It historical charter stated:
“Article 3 The Palestinian Arab people has the legitimate right to its homeland and is an inseparable part of the Arab Nation. It shares the sufferings and aspirations of the Arab Nation and its struggle for freedom, sovereignty, progress and unity.
Article 4: The people of Palestine determine its destiny when it completes the liberation of its homeland in accordance with its own wishes and free will and choice.
Article 5: The Palestinian personality is a permanent and genuine characteristic that does not disappear. It is transferred from fathers to sons.
Article 6: The Palestinians are those Arab citizens who were living normally in Palestine up to 1947, whether they remained or were expelled. Every child who was born to a Palestinian Arab father after this date, whether in Palestine or outside, is a Palestinian.
Article 7: Jews of Palestinian origin are considered Palestinians if they are willing to live peacefully and loyally in Palestine.” [11]
While this is a principle charter of the liberation of Palestine it suffered from a flow as it does not call for one democratic state for all the people who live in Palestine. This approach united the Israeli Jews around the Zionists rather than split the Israelis or at least a section of the Israelis. The event in 1970 in Jordan when the PLO fought against the army of Jordan forced the PLO to move to Lebanon where they were forced to leave in 1982 to Algeria. The PLO began to change its charter already in 1974 with the famous speech of Arafat known as the “gun and olive branch” speech. Among other things he said: ”Our world aspires to peace, justice, equality and freedom. It wishes that oppressed nations, bent under the weight of imperialism, might gain their freedom and their right to self-determination. It hopes to place the relations between nations on a basis of equality, peaceful coexistence, mutual respect for each other’s internal affairs, secure national sovereignty, independence and territorial unity on the basis of justice and mutual benefit”… thereafter for the preservation of universal peace. For only with such peace will a new world order endure in which peoples can live free of oppression, fear, terror and the suppression of their rights. As I said earlier, this is the true perspective in which to set the question of Palestine. I shall now do so for the General Assembly, keeping firmly in mind both the perspective and the goal of a coming world order. If the immigration of Jews to Palestine had had as its objective the goal of enabling them to live side by side with us, enjoying the same rights and assuming the same duties, we would have opened our doors to them, as far as our homeland’s capacity for absorption permitted., we respect the Jewish faith. Today, almost one century after the rise of the Zionist movement, we wish to warn of its increasing danger to the Jews of the world, to our Arab people and to world peace and security. For zionism encourages the Jew to emigrate out of his homeland and grants him an artificially-created nationality. As he stood in an Israeli military court, the Jewish revolutionary, Ahud Adif, said: “I am no terrorist; I believe that a democratic State should exist on this land.” Adif now languishes in a Zionist prison among his co-believers. To him and his colleagues I send my heartfelt good wishes.” [12]
The Left Fronts
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was founded on December 11, 1967, with the union of two left-wing Palestinian organizations. Its leaders were Wadi’ Haddad and George Habash, the general secretary. The group was originally backed by Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser.
The PFLP was influenced by the strategy of Che Guevara of guerilla warfare. The PFLP never agreed to recognize Israel and left the PLO after the acceptance of the “Stage Strategy” (June 1974) as adopted in Cairo by the Palestinian National Council. The PFLP opposed the Oslo accords and is critical of the Palestinian Authority but it returned to the PLO.
The collapse of the Soviet Union has weakened it. Today the PFLP aim is to mobilize and lead the struggle of the Palestinian masses for the return to Palestine, self-determination, and the establishment of a Palestinian state, liberating all of Palestine, and establish a democratic Palestinian state where all citizens enjoy equal rights, free from discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or religious belief. Thus the declared aim of the PFLP is the establishment of a democratic socialist society.
The Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP) was founded on February 22, 1969, after it split from the PFLP. It was founded by Naif Hawatmeh. The DFLP, belongs to the PLO and initially supported armed insurrection against Israel. After it was expelled from Lebanon in 1982 it became closer Fatah. It is part of the Palestinian Authority and has a present in Gaza as well.
Land Day
On 30 March 1976 thousands of Palestinians from towns and villages in the Galilee region, northern Israel, marched in protest against an Israeli order to confiscate land belonging to indigenous communities in the area. The equivalent of 2,000 hectares was ordered for appropriation.
Israel’s move to seize land was viewed as a continuation of the policy to “Judaise” the territory at the expense of Palestinians. The vast majority (750,000) had already been expelled by Israel and the land and property they left behind was seized by the Israeli government through dubious legal means.
Israeli security forces reacted by deploying the army, border police and armored units to the Palestinian villages. Violent confrontations ensued resulting in six deaths and injuries to over one hundred people.
It is not an accident that the people of Gaza have begun their latest protest on Land day, nor that Israel reacted with killing 200 people among them children, invalids, journalists and medics. It is another war crime.
The First Intifada
In December 1987, after twenty years in which Israel, enforced curfews and raids, arrests, deportations and house demolitions, the First Intifada broke out in the 1967 occupied lands of Palestine. It was an uprising which would last for over five years, in which Israel killed close to 2,000 Palestinians and wounded many thousands who struggled for their freedom, according to Israeli Human rights organization B’tzelem. (See Tables 1-4) [13]
Table 4. Palestinians killed in the Occupied Territories (including East Jerusalem)
Year Palestinians killed Of them: Minors Palestinians killed Of them: Minors
by Israeli under age 17 by Israeli civilians under age 17
security forces
Dec 9-31 1987 22 5 0 0
1988 289 48 15 2
1989 285 78 17 5
1990 125 23 9 2
1991 91 24 6 3
1992 134 23 2 0
1993-13.9.93 124 36 5 1
14.9.93-31.12.93 30 4 8 0
1994 106 16 38 8
1995 42 4 2 1
1996 69 10 3 1
1997 18 5 4 0
1998 21 3 6 0
1999 8 0 0 0
2000 until 28.9 12 2 0 0
Total 1,376 281 115 23
Table 5. Israelis killed in the Occupied Territories (including East Jerusalem)
Year Israeli civilians killed Of them: Minors Israeli security forces
by Palestinians under age 17 personnel killed by Palestinians
Dec 9-31 1987 0 0 0
1988 6 3 4
1989 3 0 6
1990 4 0 3
1991 7 0 1
1992 11 0 14
1993-13.9.93 16 0 15
14.9.93-31.12.93 11 0 3
1994 11 0 12
1995 7 0 9
1996 3 1 19
1997 4 0 0
1998 8 0 3
1999 1 0 2
2000 until 28.9 2 0 0
Total 94 4 91
Table 6. Palestinians within the Green Line
Year Palestinians killed Palestinians killed
by Israeli security forces by Israeli civilians
Dec 9-31 1987 0 0
1988 1 5
1989 1 2
1990 1 10
1991 5 2
1992 2 0
1993-13.9.93 7 2
14.9.93-31.12.93 4 0
1994 7 1
1995 0 1
1996 0 2
1997 0 1
1998 0 1
1999 1 0
2000 until 28.9 4 0
Total 33 27
Table 7. Israelis killed within the Green Line
Year Israeli civilians Of them: Minors Israeli security forces personnel
killed by Palestinians under age 17 killed by Palestinians
Dec 9-31 1987 0 0 0
1988 2 0 0
1989 17 1 5
1990 13 0 2
1991 7 0 4
1992 8 1 1
1993-13.9.93 6 0 5
14.9.93-31.12.93 3 0 2
1994 47 2 4
1995 9 0 21
1996 38 7 15
1997 25 3 0
1998 1 0 0
1999 1 0 0
2000 until 28.9 0 0 0
Total 177 14 59
This was a new generation who did not suffer from the feeling of shame and humiliation of the defeat in 1967. Israel, the so called only democracy in the Middle East, used all its military power to crash the popular uprising and failed. It began after hundreds of Palestinians witnessed the killing of four men who were run down by an Israeli jeep outside Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza on 8 December. Ten thousand people attended the funerals of those killed. The following day Israeli troops fired aimlessly into a demonstrating crowd, killing 17 year-old Hatem Abu Sisi and wounding 16 others. Palestinians took control of neighborhoods, barricaded roads to prevent Israeli army vehicles from entering. They defended themselves by throwing stones at the soldiers and their tanks. Shopkeepers closed their businesses and the workers refused to go to their workplaces in Israel where they were used as cheap labor.
Since the Israeli state could not break the intifada by force they had to look for political and diplomatic means. In 1993 Rabin was the Prime Minister of Israel who signed the Oslo agreement and since then has been considered a peace loving person. After his assassination by a right wing fanatic Yegal Amir, he became a symbol of the good Zionist, a martyr of peace even by the left and soft Zionists and pro-Zionists.
But what was his history? The Los Angeles Time reported in June 1990:”An Israeli colonel accused of ordering soldiers to break the limbs of Palestinians testified today that beatings were “part of the accepted norm in that period” of the Palestinian uprising. Testifying in his own defense, Col. Yehuda Meir told three military judges that his superiors did not question the beatings because “there was nothing special in it. . . . There was nothing out of the ordinary.” Meir testified Thursday that former Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin gave orders in January, 1988, to break the bones of Palestinian inciters as punishment.” [14]
In July 1948 Zionist soldiers under the command of Yitzhak Rabin expelled most of the Arabs from Lod (Lydda) and Ramleh: “On July 11th, two platoons from the 3rd Battalion advanced from the conquered village of Daniyal toward the olive groves separating Ben Shemen from Lydda. The Arab militia defending the city held them off with machine-gun fire. In the meantime, the 89th Battalion, led by Moshe Dayan, had arrived in Ben Shemen. In the late afternoon, the battalion, consisting of a giant armored vehicle mounted with cannon, menacing half-tracks, and machine-gun-equipped jeeps, left Ben Shemen and stormed Lydda. In a forty-seven-minute-long blitz, dozens of Arabs were shot dead, including women, children, and old people. The 89th Battalion lost nine men. In the early evening, the two 3rd Battalion platoons were able to enter the city. Within hours, the soldiers held key positions in the city center and had confined thousands of Palestinian civilians in the Great Mosque. (…) The brigade commander was a Ben Shemen graduate, too. He 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. When the news reached the headquarters of Operation Larlar, in the Palestinian village of Yazur, the military commander, General Yigal Allon, asked Ben-Gurion what to do with the Arabs. Ben-Gurion waved his hand: Deport them. Hours later, Yitzhak Rabin, the operations officer, issued a written order to the Yiftach Brigade: “The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly, without regard to age.” [15]
The Oslo Agreement
Needless to say the Zionists rejected his plea. In the Oslo agreement that came after the first popular and heroic struggle of the Palestinians, the PLO accepted the idea of two states which included the readiness to recognize Israel. Furthermore, the PLO following this agreement began to collaborate with Israel against its own people who rejected this plan. The Zionist propaganda has been that there is no partner for peace and have continued to expand the Jewish settlements in order to prevent a Palestinian state in the 1967 occupied lands. In addition since 2005 the Zionists separated Gaza from the West Bank and turned Gaza to the largest Ghetto in history.
Since the war of 1967 Israel has not been very successful in its wars. It had to escape Lebanon in 2000. It has not been able to destroy Hamas. In spite of its military strength the rot is growing in every corner. Yet no part of the ruling class is able to get Israel away from the path leading to an open apartheid from the river to the sea, a path leading to even worse oppression and isolation. Today Israel has many far right friends, but the opposition to these regimes and movement is growing and many in this opposition oppose Zionism. To hide the progressive opposition to Zionism the Zionists attack all progressive movements as “Anti-Semites”.
As reactionary as Israel’s wars are, as progressive are the effects of its defeats. We saw this very clearly that with the defeat of Israel in Lebanon when it had to escape in the middle of the night in 2000, in the second war of Lebanon when it was defeated by Hezbollah, in the war of the Palestinian Authority backed by Israel against Hamas in 2007 and in the wars against Hamas. They were important factors in the break out of the Second Intifada in September 2000 as well as the Arab revolutionary uprising in 2011.
The Wars in Lebanon
In 1972: Members of the Israeli Olympic team at the Munich Olympics are taken hostage and were killed during a rescue attempt. At the same time, the Israeli government conducts operations against Palestinian leaders in Europe and Beirut. The Israeli air force killed scores of people in Jordan and Lebanon during frequent raids.
In 1973: Three Palestinian leaders were assassinated in Beirut.
In March 1978: Al Fatah militants landed on the Israeli coast south of Haifa, attacking a bus and cars on the Tel Aviv-Haifa highway. Thirty-five Israelis were killed and at least seventy-four were wounded.
In April 1978: The IDF launched Operation Litani. This Israeli military offensive forced an estimated 285,000 people to become refugees, with over 6,000 homes destroyed or badly damaged and between 1,000 – 2,000 Lebanese civilians were killed. [16]
“When Anwar Sadat was murdered, on the eighth anniversary of the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, Menachem Begin hastened to annex the Golan Heights, in the hope of pushing Hosni Mubarak to freeze the Israeli-Egyptian peace and so provide Begin with a pretext for cancelling the evacuations of Yamit and Sharm al-Sheikh to which Israel was committed. In this scenario, Syria was cast as the agent of a violent response to the annexation. In response to the response, the Northern Command would embark on a campaign including an invasion of Lebanon, for a threefold purpose – to wipe out the PLO forces, push out the Syrian army and get as far as Beirut to help Israel’s darling, Bashir Gemayel, get elected president. [17]
In 1982: The Israeli government invaded Lebanon after the assassination attempt against Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Shlomo Argov, by the Abu Nidal Organization, Fatah – The Revolutionary Council (Fatah al-Majles al-Thawry) an organization that opposed the PLO.
This provided the excuse. After attacking the PLO, as well as Syrian, leftist and Muslim Lebanese forces, Israel occupied southern Lebanon for 18 years. The PLO was surrounded in West Beirut and, after heavy bombardment, the PLO fighters negotiated passage from Lebanon with the aid of Special Envoy Philip Habib and the protection of international peacekeepers. The PLO moved to Algeria and will return to Palestine only after the Oslo agreement.
“The documents of the Institute for Palestine studies (IPS include transcripts of meetings between senior Israeli officials and Lebanese Force (Phalanges) leaders starting in January 1982 that include discussions about ‘cleaning out of the [Palestinian] refugee camps,” and the need for “several D[e]ir Yassins.” They include as well several explicit references to the decimation and expulsion of the camps’ population from Lebanon, such that “Sabra would become a zoo and Shatilah [sic] Beirut’s parking place.’ These documents show that Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon, Chief of Staff Lt. General Rafael Eitan, Chief of Military Intelligence Maj. General Yehoshua Saguy, the head of the Mossad, Yitzhak Hofi, and his deputy and successor, Nahum Admoni, were fully informed of the murderous proclivities of the LF long before they decided to introduce them into Sabra and Shatila. They had detailed knowledge of the massacre the LF had perpetrated in August 1976 at Tal al-Za‘tar camp (the documents show that Israel had liaison officers on the spot), and elsewhere during previous phases of the Lebanese civil war. They were fully aware of LF atrocities against Palestinians and Lebanese in the areas of South Lebanon, the Shouf and ‘Aley that the Israeli army occupied during June 1982, and where it allowed the LF to operate freely. They knew perfectly well the lethal intentions of the LF towards the Palestinians. While these documents show that Sharon and others sought to evade their responsibility for the massacre before the Kahan commission, no reader of them can have the slightest doubt about what Sharon and his generals intended in deciding to introduce their LF allies into the camps”.
Israel occupied Lebanon for 18 years. If it could it would annex it. However Israel had to escape due to the military actions of Hezbollah. During this occupation it jailed many Lebanese and Palestinians. The most known was Ansar. “It was not a traditional prison camp, neither in terms of the aims the Israelis wanted to achieve in that prison camp, nor as far as the number of detainees was concerned, nor as far as the legal status and the nature of the prisoners themselves were concerned.
Ansar began a few weeks after the beginning of the war. Every single soul was brought to detention places in Sidon and Tyre; children – even newborn infants carried by their mothers –; all had to assemble in the church yards or mosque yards, or on the seashore of Sidon and Tyre. At one time, they herded about 20, 000 people on the seashore of Sidon. The most infamous places of detention were the Nuns’ School of St. Joseph and the Safa factory in Sidon. Those places were mini-holocausts. Those who experienced either of these places still have marks on their souls. Many died under torture there. Then a bigger and more permanent place was needed, and Ansar came into being.
The population – both the Palestinian and Lebanese populations – were divided: the males were in Ansar exposed to all sorts of ill treatment, and the rest – mainly women, children and old men – were in the South, facing all kinds of insecurity. Wives were compelled to leave their homes seeking work to support their children. Children were compelled to leave school to find work to subsidize the family. Many students left school because the teachers were detained in Ansar. In this way, both those who were detained and those who were outside the prison were exposed to pressure and to danger.
When the tanks were advancing through the south of Lebanon, a committee called the Committee for the Rehabilitation of Palestinian Refugees was established, headed by Meridor, the Israeli Minister of Finance at that time. The establishment of such a committee must have been premeditated. In Sidon, during a meeting between the Finance Minister and some other Israeli officials, an official asked the Minister, “What shall we do about the Palestinian refugees?” The Minister waved his hand and said, “Push them east” the same phrase used by the German Nazis.
The number of prisoners who passed through the gates of Ansar was about 15, 000. According to the figure registered with the International Red Cross and according to Israeli documents, 12, 000 passed through. This is not the real figure, however, because a few thousand prisoners didn’t have numbers and were not visited by the ICRC, neither in Ansar itself, nor in Sidon and Tyre where there were other detention centers. The largest number of prisoners in Ansar at one time was about 9,500, distributed among 22 sections.
Who were the prisoners? In fact, less than 10 percent were active PLO members, arrested from all over Lebanon. Some of them were kidnapped from boats sailing between Cyprus and Tripoli; others were taken from Beirut itself, in addition to those taken from the South. The rest of the prisoners were UNRWA employees, teachers, headmasters of schools, doctors, lawyers, artists, Lebanese government employees, mukhtars of the Lebanese villages and the refugee camps, merchants, laborers and male nurses. Ansar was, in fact, a microcosm of the society itself. The ages ranged from 12 (the youngest prisoner), to 85. Thousands were over the ages of 45 and 50.” [18]
The Occupation of 1967
Since 1967 to 2014 800,000 Palestinians have been in Israeli prisons. [19] In the recent past around 20,000 Palestinians have been in prison a year which means that by now 900,000 Palestinians have been in Israeli prisons.
Map 3. Palestinian Loss of Land 1946 – Present
Around 650,000 settlers live in over 230 settlements built illegally since the 1967 occupation of the Palestinian lands, over 42% of the West Bank.
The new National Law states:
“A. The land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people, in which the State of Israel was established.
B. The State of Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, in which it fulfills its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.
C. The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.
7 — Jewish settlement
A. The state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.” [20]
Thus this law is a clear and open statement that Israel is an apartheid state.
Gaza
Most of the Palestinians living in Gaza are of families who were expelled by Israel in 1948. When Israel considered annexing Gaza it built there settlements. When Sharon became the Prime Minister of Israel he removed the settlements and Israel imposed a siege on it since 2005. It simply changed the form of Israeli occupation and became the largest ghetto in history. In 2006, Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections and took control of the Palestinian government. Israel and the U.S have imposed sanctions against the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority because the imperialists have declared Hamas a terrorist organization. It cannot be denied that Hamas have used the method of terror, however comparing Hamas‘s terrorism to the Israel and the US terrorism is like comparing a Mosquito to an elephant. The movement of both goods and people into and out of Gaza is severely restricted by Israel and has been restricted for decades. Prior to 1991, Palestinians could move with relative freedom between the West Bank and Gaza. Israel has placed a blockade over Gaza, severely limiting exports and imports and banning nearly all travel by residents of Gaza. Between 2007 and 2010, even basic necessities such as cooking gas, water filtration equipment, toilet paper, tooth paste, clothes, noodles, candy, and spices were blocked from entering Gaza. In 2010, the Israeli government announced an “easing” of the blockade and allowed for a limited increase in imports such as clothing and food.
“According to Defense for Children International—Palestine, during the first year after the disengagement the Israeli military fired over 15,000 shells into Gaza, conducted over 550 airstrikes on Gaza, and carried out regular military incursions into Gaza. Operation Summer Rains during June 2006 left at least 256 Palestinians dead and 848 injured. At least 85 more Palestinians were killed in Gaza during a November 2006 military offensive which was codenamed Operation Autumn Clouds. In Operation Warm Winter in February and March 2008 Israel killed 120 (34 children) and injured 269 (at least 63 children). Israel during Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 killed more than 1,400 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians. More than 16,000 Gazans were permanently displaced from their homes which were destroyed during the attack. In Operation Pillar of Cloud in Gaza during November 2012 Israel killed 168 Palestinians and destroying hundreds of homes. In July 2014 Israel began Operation Protective Edge. According to U.N. OCHA, 2,220 Palestinians in Gaza, including more than 550 children, were killed since 30 March last year Israel killed 200 people and injured many thousands.” [21]
The UN Human Rights Council will accuse the Zionist entity of war crimes for its bloody repression of Palestinian protests in the Gaza Strip that have killed more than 190 Palestinians. This however is not going to stop Israel from committing war crimes, because of the role it plays for the imperialist control of the region.
Today there is no Zionist party with any weight that is ready to accept a solution based on the borders of 1967 that has given Israel 78% of Palestine. The right-wing Zionist parties are openly for one apartheid state from the river to the sea. The so called center Zionists support the large settlements and reject the right of the return of the Palestinian refugees. The only Zionist Party that accept a two state solution on the borders of 1967 is the small party Meretz which cannot prevent turning Israel to an open apartheid.
Clearly the Zionists have condemned the Palestinians to life of discrimination and repression and the Israeli Jews to wars until Israel will lose badly one of them.
Thus the only way forward is one democratic state that will accept the refugees where the Palestinians and the Israelis will be equal. This will happen either when the Arab revolution will win or Israel will be defeated very badly in a war. For this to be realized a workers mostly Arabs must win and establish red democratic Palestine as part of the Socialist Federation of the Middle East. For this we need to build the Fifth International.
[1] Ofer Aderet: Israel Genocide? Oct 13, 2018, https://israelgenocide.com/tag/david-ben-gurion/
[2] For an extensive analysis of the 1967 war from a Marxist point of view see e.g. Yossi Schwartz: Israel’s Six-Day War of 1967. On the Character of the War, the Marxist Analysis and the Position of the Israeli Left, July 2013, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/israel-s-war-of-1967/
[3] https://www.jpost.com/Magazine/50-years-of-law-versus-reality-493859
[4] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1979, p. 616
[5] Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s Chief of Staff in 1967, in Le Monde, 2/28/1968
[6] New York Times, August 21, 1982; Noam Chomsky: The Fateful Triangle
[7] Tom Segev: 1967. Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East, Metropolitan Books, New York 2007, p. 261
[8] Cheryl A. Rubenberg, Israel and the American National Interest: A Critical Examination, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986, p. 113
[9] Bar Zohar: Ben Gurion, p. 158
[10] Stephen Green, Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations with a Militant Israel (Brattleboro, Vt.: Amana Books, 1988), pp. 204-11. Green’s principal source claims to have participated in the operation
[11] The Palestinian National Charter, Resolution of the Palestine National Council July 1-17, 1968, https://unispal.un.org/DPA/DPR/unispal.nsf/0/B508C2071B4377DB85256CED00716FA3
[12] https://unispal.un.org/DPA/DPR/unispal.nsf/0/A238EC7A3E13EED18525624A007697EC
[13] https://www.btselem.org/statistics_old
[14] Los Angeles Time, http://articles.latimes.com/1990-06-22/news/mn-431_1_rabin-ordered
[15] Ari Shavit: A city, a massacre, and the Middle East today, The New Yorker October 21, 2013 Issue
[16] https://historyguy.com/israel-lebanon_conflict.html
[17] Amir Oren: With Ariel Sharon Gone, Israel Reveals the Truth About the 1982 Lebanon War, Haaretz, September 17, 2017
[18] Palestine: Information with Provenance (PIWP database), al-Ansar prison camp, Lebanon
[19] http://imemc.org/article/67566/
[20] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Law:_Israel_as_the_Nation-State_of_the_Jewish_People
[21] Information based on report of American Service friends Committee https://www.afsc.org/resource/gaza-under-siege
VII. The Solution
In the existing framework of the imperialist domination of the Middle East, where Israel is the front line of such imperialist control, there is no solution to the Palestinian question. The formula of two states, where the Palestinians will get 22% of their country, is simply a cover up that allows Israel expanding the settlements and continuing the dispossession of the Palestinians.
According to a poll taken in March 2019 27% of Israelis back a complete annexation of the West Bank. Another 15% back the annexation of Area C which encompasses 60% of the West Bank. This means 42% of Israelis back the annexation of the West Bank in some form. Of those, 16% of respondents said they support annexation with no political rights for Palestinians, while 11% approve of annexation with political rights for Palestinians. Only 28% of respondents opposed any annexation. 30% said that they weren’t sure. [1]
This poll shows that there is no force in Israel, a colonialist settler society, that will support a Palestinian state even in the borders of 1967. Only 28% of the Jews are ready to support the solution of a mini Palestinian state. The Palestinians themselves are not strong enough to force Israel to accept such a mini Palestinian state. The Arab ruling classes in Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia collaborate with imperialist Israel. The UN is not a forum willing and able to force Israel to withdraw from the 1967 occupied lands.
This does not mean that there is no force that can solve this question. This force is the Arab and Iranian working class and the peasants. We have seen the fear of all the imperialists and their local servants in the region of the Arab Spring which began in 2011. The Arab spring has not won so far because of the lack of a working class revolutionary leadership. Such a leadership as part of a world party will fight for a socialist federation of the Middle East that Palestine will be part of it.
The struggle will continue for democratic rights. The Arab spring is not dead as we see today in countries like Tunisia and Algeria, but to win it will have to use the theory and the strategy of permanent revolution of Leon Trotsky. Trotsky argued that the working class with the support of the poor peasants would have to carry out the democratic revolution. In addition events would force the proletariat to implement socialist measures alongside bourgeois-democratic measures, thus stepping over the bourgeois-democratic phase of the revolution.
In this struggle it is necessary to win over a section of the Israelis and, in particular, of the workers and the poor.
Unlike the right-wing centrists of Peter Taaffe’s CWI and Alan Woods’ IMT who claim that the key to the national question in Palestine is winning the Jewish working class and for this it is necessary to advocate the self-determination of the Jews in Palestine, revolutionaries recognize the similarity of Israel to the South African apartheid state.
Trotsky wrote on South Africa: “A victorious revolution is unthinkable without the awakening of the native masses. In its turn, that will give them what they are so lacking today – confidence in their strength, a heightened personal consciousness, a cultural growth. Under these conditions the South African Republic will emerge first of all as a “black” republic; this does not exclude, of course, either full equality for the whites, or brotherly relations between the two races – depending mainly on the conduct of the whites. But it is entirely obvious that the predominant majority of the population, liberated from slavish dependence, will put a certain imprint on the state.“ [2]
These centrists claim that Trotsky’s letter on South Africa is not relevant because in South Africa the whites were a minority and this is not the case in Israel. This argument reveals that they are unable to realize the significant facts that Jews are a small minority in the region. Reformist and centrist cannot see beyond the borders of “their” national state and in the case of the centrist in Israel (occupied Palestine) it pushes them to kneel before the Zionists.
A meaningful section of the Jewish is not going to break from Zionism in the very near future but as Israel is getting rotten and at the same time the gap between the rich and the poor is growing daily, under different circumstance a section of the Israelis may realize that it is only hope is to be part of the Arab revolution. Different circumstance can be either a powerful military defeat of Israel in one of its coming wars or a victorious Arab revolution or revolutions in other parts of the world.
We have seen that a section of the Israeli population reacted to the Egyptian mass struggle in Tahrir Square by forming a protest movement in Israel. Furthermore the only time that a section of the colonialist Jews broke from Zionism was in response to the Russian revolution.
[1] Jerusalem Post, March 25, 2019
[2] Leon Trotsky: On the South African Theses (1935); in: Trotsky Writings 1934-35, p. 249
About the Author
Yossi Schwartz was born in Jerusalem in 1945 to a family with roots in Palestine since the 1760s. He was a left Zionist from the age of 15 until his early 20s. In 1966 he protested against the visit of Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor of West Germany, as part of the new alliance of Israel with Germany. Yossi protested this visit with the slogan: six millions times no, because of Adenauer anti-communist political views, because he was a strong supporter of the cold war and because his administration was full of Nazis. Yossi was arrested during the demonstration in Jerusalem after he was beaten by six policemen. He was charged and found guilty of beating up six policemen.
This led him to begin his study of the nature of Zionism which made him an Anti-Zionist. He was a soldier (a medic) in the Israeli army and participated in this role in the 1967 war. He opposed the Israeli side and propagandized against the Israeli war during the war. After 1967 he formed, together with other left figures, the New Left (Shiah) that opposed the 1967 occupation. He was the first person who raised the Palestinian national flag in the Hebrew University in 1968. In response to Golda Meir, the Prime Minister of Israel that began the new settlements in the West Bank, he organized a symbolic settlement in her garden in Jerusalem and was arrested for it.
Yossi became a Trotskyist in 1970 and has been a Trotskyist since then. He was blacklisted in Israel and was forced to leave Israel to survive. He lived in Canada between 1974 and 1998 where he became a lawyer and helped many Palestinians refugees escaping the brutal repression of the Palestinians by Israel during the first Intifada to settle in Canada. Yossi opposed the Oslo agreement and condemned it as a betrayal of the PLO. In 1998 Yossi returned to Israel and since 2003 he supports the idea of one democratic state from the river to the sea – a Red Democratic Palestine. That will be formed by the workers and the fellahins as part of the Arab revolution. Such a state will include all the Palestinian refugees who want to return and all the Israeli Jews who are ready to live as equal to the Palestinians.
Yossi is a member of the Internationalist Socialist League (Section of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency [RCIT] in Israel / Occupied Palestine) and also a leading member of the RCIT. Furthermore, he is a member of the Movement for One Democratic State in all Palestine.