A Review Of The Ethnic Cleansing Of Palestine By Ilan Pappe
By Stephen Lendman
09 February, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Ilan Pappe is an Israeli historian and senior lecturer at Haifa
University. He's also Academic Director of the Research Institute for
Peace at Givat Haviva and Chair of the Emil Touma Institute for
Palestinian Studies. Pappe is an expert on Israel and Zionism and the
Palestinians' Right of Return to their homeland, is considered "an
honourable academic with integrity and conscience," and is a member of
the Advisory Board of the Council for Palestinian Restitution and
Repatriation (CPRR), an organization declaring that "every Palestinian
has a legitimate, individual right to return to his or her original
home and to absolute restitution of his or her property."
Pappe is also one of Israel's "new historians" whose scholarship and
writings are based on access to material now available from British
Mandate period and Israeli archives that provide the most accurate and
authentic documented history of Israel before and after it became a
state and which now serve to debunk the myths about the years leading
up to the Jewish State's founding and those following it to this day.
Pappe has also authored, contributed to or edited nine books. His
latest is the one this review covers in detail so readers will know
about its powerful and shocking content, unknown to most in the West
and in Israel, that hopefully will arouse them enough to get the book
and learn in full detail what Pappe documented. He proves from official
records how the Israeli state came into being with blood on its hands
from lands forcibly seized from its Palestinian inhabitants who'd lived
on it for hundreds of years previously. Since the 1940s, they were
ethnically cleansed and slaughtered without mercy so their homeland
would become one for Jews alone.
The shameful result is that Palestinians then and today have almost no
rights including being able to live in peace and security on their own
land in their own state that no longer exists. Survivors then and their
offspring either live in Israel as unwanted Arab citizens with few
rights or in the Occupied Palestinians Territories (OPT) where their
lives are suspended in limbo in an occupied country in which they're
subjected to daily institutionalized and codified racism and
persecution. They have no power over their daily lives and live in a
constant state of fear with good reason. They face economic
strangulation; collective punishment for any reason; loss of free
movement; enclosures by separation walls, electric fences and border
closings; regular curfews, roadblocks, checkpoints, loss of their homes
by bulldozings and crops and orchards by wanton destruction and
seizure; arrest without cause, and routine subjection to torture while
in custody.
They're targeted for extra-judicial assassination and indiscriminate
killing; taxed punitively and denied basic services essential to life
and well-being including health care, education, employment and even
enough food and water at the whim of Israeli authorities in a
deliberate effort to destroy their will to resist and eliminate those
who won't by expulsion or extermination. Palestinians have no power to
end these appalling abuses and crimes against humanity or receive any
redress for them in Israeli, the West or through the International
Criminal Court Israel ignores when it rules against its interests.
How can they as Muslims in a racist Jewish state where Israelis
oppressive them with impunity, the US goes along with huge financing
and supplying of the most modern and destructive weapons of war, and
the West and most Arab states are indifferent preferring to ally with
Israel and the US for benefits received while writing off Palestinians
as a small price worth paying. It created state of appalling human
misery and desperation severely aggravated by crushing economic
sanctions for the past year imposed for the first time ever on an
occupied people. They're responsible for poverty and unemployment
levels of 80% or more and increasing instances of starvation and
unreported deaths from all causes because Israel controls everything
and everyone allowed in and out of the territories. Those inside them
suffer painfully as a result. Others with power to help, don't care and
do nothing.
Pappe documents how it all began in 12 chapters with a short epilogue
plus 18 graphic pictures needing no explanation. He calls the book his
"J'Accuse against the politicians who devised the plan and the generals
who carried out the ethnic cleansing" naming the guilty, the villages
and urban areas destroyed, and the cruelest crimes committed against
defenseless people only wanting to live in peace on their own land and
were willing to do it with Jews as neighbors but not as overlords or
oppressors.
This review is lengthy so readers will know in detail what Israeli
authorities successfully suppressed for decades. Pappe courageously
revealed it in a book begging to be read and discussed by all people of
conscience and good faith. They need to take the lead building a
groundswell consensus to stand up to this long-festering injustice
against defenseless people fighting for their rights and existence
against overwhelming odds.
Pappe provides them help with his extensive documentation and other
suggested reading on the origins of Zionist ideology leading to the
ethnic cleansing in the 1940s and thereafter. He particularly mentions
two of Nur Masalha's important books - Expulsion of the Palestinians:
The Concept of Transfer in Zionist Political Thought, 1882 - 1948 and
The Politics of Denial: Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem.
Readers are encouraged to explore this issue further with these and
other books exposing ugly truths long suppressed in the West and
needing to be freely aired.
The Beginning - Initial Planning for Ethnic Cleansing
In his preface, Pappe writes about the "Red House" in Tel-Aviv that
became headquarters for the Hagana, the dominant Zionist underground
paramilitary militia during the British Mandate period in Palestine
between 1920 and 1948 when the Jewish state came into being. He details
how David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, met with leading
Zionists and young Jewish military officers on March 10, 1948 to
finalize plans to ethnically cleanse Palestine that unfolded in the
months that followed including "large-scale (deadly serious)
intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population
centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion;
demolition; and finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any
of the expelled inhabitants from returning."
The final master plan was called Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew) following
plans A, B, and C preceding it. It was to be a war without mercy
complying with what Ben-Gurion said in June, 1938 to the Jewish Agency
Executive and never wavering from later: "I am for compulsory transfer;
I do not see anything immoral in it." Plan D became the way to do it.
It included forcible expulsion of hundreds of thousands of unwanted
Palestinian Arabs in urban and rural areas accompanied by an unknown
number of others mass slaughtered to get it done. The goal was simple
and straightforward - to create an exclusive Jewish state without an
Arab presence by any means including mass-murder.
Once begun, the whole ugly business took six months to complete. It
expelled about 800,000 people, killed many others, and destroyed 531
villages and 11 urban neighborhoods in cities like Tel-Aviv, Haifa and
Jerusalem. The action was a clear case of ethnic cleansing that
international law today calls a crime against humanity for which
convicted Nazis at Nuremberg were hanged. So far Israelis have always
remained immune from international law even though names of guilty
leaders and those charged with implementing their orders are known as
well as the crimes they committed.
They included cold-blooded mass-murder; destruction of homes, villages
and crops; rapes; other atrocities; and massacres of defenseless people
given no quarter including women and children. The crimes were
suppressed and expunged from official accounts as Israeli
historiography cooked up the myth that Palestinians left voluntarily
fearing harm from invading Arab armies. It was a lie covering up
Israeli crimes Palestinians call the Nakba - the catastrophe or
disaster that's still a cold, harsh festering unresolved injustice.
Even with British armed presence still in charge of law and order
before its Mandate ended, Jewish forces completed the expulsion of
about 250,000 Palestinians the Brits did nothing to stop. It continued
unabated because when neighboring Arab states finally intervened, they
did so without conviction. They came belatedly and with only small, ill-
equipped forces, no match for a superior, well-armed Israeli military
easily able to prevail as discussed below.
Ethnic Cleansing Defined
Pappe notes that ethnic cleansing is well-defined in international law
that calls it a crime against humanity. He cites several definitions
including from the Hutchinson encyclopedia saying it's expulsion by
force to homogenize the population. The US State Department concurs
adding its essence is to eradicate a region's history. The United
Nations used a similar definition in 1993 when the UN Commission on
Human Rights (UNCHR) characterized it as the desire of a state or
regime to impose ethnic rule on a mixed area using expulsion and other
violence including separating men and women, detentions, murder of
males of all ages who might become combatants, destruction of houses,
and repopulating areas with another ethnic group.
In 1948, Zionists waged their "War of Independence" using Plan D to
"cleanse" Palestine according to the UN definition. It involved cold-
blooded massacres and indiscriminate killing, targeted assassinations
and widespread destruction as clear instances of crimes of war and
against humanity, later expunged from the country's official history
and erased from its collective memory. It was left it to a few
courageous historians like Ilan Pappe to resurrect events to preserve
the truth too important to let die. His invaluable book provides an
historic account of what, in fact, happened. It needs broad exposure
but won't get it in the corporate-controlled Israeli, US or Western
media overall. It will on this important web site with the courage to
publish it.
Zionism's Ideological Roots
Pappe traces the roots of Zionism to the late 1880s in Central and
Eastern Europe "as a national revival movement, prompted by the growing
pressure on Jews in those regions to assimilate totally or risk
continuing persecution." Founded by Theodor Herzl, the movement became
international in scope supporting a Jewish homeland in the Land of
Israel, or Eretz Israel, even though early on many in the movement were
ambivalent about its location. That changed following Herzl's death in
1904 when it was decided the goal was to colonize Palestine because of
its biblical connection that happened to be land occupied
inappropriately by "strangers" meaning anyone not Jewish having "no
right" to be there.
So as justification, the myth was created of "a land without people
for a people without a land" even though this "empty land" had a
flourishing Palestinian Arab population including a small number of
Jews. Zionist leaders wanted a complete dispossession of indigenous
Arabs to reestablish the ancient land of Eretz Israel as a Jewish state
for Jews alone and got help doing it from the British after Palestine
became part of its empire post-WW I. With duplicity, the Brits crafted
the 1917 Balfour Declaration supporting the notion of a Jewish homeland
in Palestine while simultaneously promising indigenous Arabs their
rights would be protected and land would be freed from foreign rule.
Palestinian Arabs saw through the scheme wanting no part of it. It was
their land, and they weren't about to give it up without a struggle.
They strongly opposed further Jewish immigration but to no avail, as
their wishes conflicted with British plans for the territory. It set
off decades of conflict leading to the establishment of the Jewish
state in 1948 with British help under their Mandate and neighboring
Arab state indifference doing little to prevent it. Palestinians lost
their homeland, their struggle for justice goes on unresolved, and
these beleaguered people are virtually isolated from the West and their
Arab neighbors preferring alliance with Israel for their own interests
that exclude helping Palestinian people get theirs served including a
viable independent state free from Israeli occupation.
Pappe traces the early post-Balfour history when Palestinians
comprised 80 - 90% of the population. Even then they fared poorly under
British Mandate rule giving Zionist settlers preferential treatment. It
led to uprisings in 1929 and 1936, the later one lasting three years
before being brutally suppressed. In its wake, Britain expelled
Palestinian leaders making their people vulnerable to Jewish forces
post-WW II that led to their defeat and subjugation. The sympathetic
British Mandate made it possible by helping Jewish settlers transform
their 1920 paramilitary organization into the Hagana, a name meaning
defense. It then became the military arm of the Jewish Agency or
Zionist governing body now called the Israel Defense Forces or IDF.
Planning the Expulsion of the Palestinians
David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, led the Zionist
movement from the mid-1920s until well into the 1960s. He played a
central role and had supreme authority planning the establishment of a
Jewish state serving as its "architect" with full control over all
security and defense issues in the Jewish community. His goal was
Jewish sovereignty over as much of ancient Palestine as possible
achieved the only way he thought possible - by forceable removable of
Palestinians from their land so Jews could be resettled in it.
To do it, he and other Zionist leaders needed a systematic plan to
"cleanse" the land for Jewish habitation only. It began with a detailed
registry or inventory of Arab villages the Jewish National Fund (JNF)
was assigned to compile. The JNF was founded in 1901 as the main
Zionist tool for the colonization of Palestine. Its purpose was to buy
land used to settle Jewish immigrants that by the end of the British
Mandate in 1948 amounted to 5.8% of Palestine or a small fraction of
what Zionists wanted for a Jewish state. Early on, Ben-Gurion and
others knew a more aggressive approach was needed for their
colonization plan to succeed.
It began with the JNF Arab village inventory that was a blueprint
completed by the late 1930s that included the topographic location of
each village with detailed information including husbandry, cultivated
land, number of trees, quality of fruit, average amount of land per
family, number of cars, shop owners, Palestinian clans and their
political affiliation, descriptions of village mosques and names of
their imams, civil servants and more. The final inventory update was
finished in 1947 with lists of "wanted" persons in each village
targeted in 1948 for search-and-arrest operations with those seized
summarily shot on the spot in cold blood.
The idea was simple - kill the leaders and anyone thought to be a
threat the British hadn't already eliminated quelling the 1936-39
uprising. It created a power vacuum neutralizing any effective
opposition to Zionists' plans. The only remaining obstacle thereafter
was the British presence Ben-Gurion knew was on the way out by 1946
before it finally ended in May, 1948.
Partition, Ethnic Cleansing, War, and Establishment of the State of
Israel
Ethnic cleansing began in early December, 1947 when Palestinians
comprised two-thirds of the population and Jews, mostly from war-torn
Europe, the other third. The British tried dealing with two distinct
ethnic entities choosing partition as the way to do it. By 1937, this
solution became the centerpiece of Zionist policy, but it proved too
hard for the Brits to resolve and be able to satisfy both sides. It
instead handed the problem to the newly formed UN to deal with before
their Mandate ended.
It put the Palestinians' fate in the hands of a Special Committee for
Palestine (UNSCOP) whose members had no prior experience solving
conflicts and knew little Palestinian history. It was a recipe for
disaster as events unfolded. UNSCOP opted for partition favoring the
Jews as compensation for the Nazi holocaust that became General
Assembly Resolution 181 on November 29, 1947 giving them a state
encompassing 56% the country with one-third of the population while
making Jerusalem an international city. Palestinians were justifiably
outraged. They were excluded from the decision-making process concluded
against their will and at their expense.
From that moment on, the die was cast leading to partition, ethnic
cleansing, the first Arab-Israeli war, the others to follow, and
decades of disregard for their rights to this day creating their
desperate state with no resolution in prospect. Resolution 181 was even
worse than an unfair 56 - 44% division of territory as it allotted the
most fertile land and almost all urban and rural territory in Palestine
to the new Jewish state plus 400 of the over 1000 Palestinian villages
their residents lost with no right of appeal.
Pappe explains Ben-Gurion simultaneously accepted and rejected the
resolution. He and other Zionist leaders wanted official international
recognition of the right of Jews to have their own state in Palestine.
He was also determined to make Jerusalem the Jewish capital, intended
final borders to remain flexible wanting to include within them as much
future territory as possible, and today Israel is the only country in
the world without established borders. Ben-Gurion decided borders would
"be determined by force and not by partition resolution." He headed the
Consultancy or Consultant Committee, an ad-hoc cabal of Zionist leaders
created solely to plan the expulsion of Palestinians to cleanse the
land for Jewish habitation only.
The process began in early December, 1947 with a series of attacks
against Palestinian villages and neighborhoods. They were engaged
ineffectively from the start on January 9 by units of the first all-
Arab volunteer army. It resulted in forced expulsions beginning in mid-
February, 1948. On March 10, final Plan Dalet was adopted with its
first targets being Palestinian urban centers that were all occupied by
end of April with about 250,000 Palestinians uprooted, displaced or
killed including by massacres, the most notorious and remembered being
at Deir Yassin even though Tantura may have been the largest.
Deir Yassin was Palestinian land on April 9 when Jewish soldiers burst
into the village, machine-gunned houses randomly killing many in them.
The remaining villagers were then assembled in one place and murdered
in cold blood including children and women first raped and then killed.
Recent research puts the number massacred at 93 (including 30 babies),
but dozens more were killed in the fighting that ensued making the
total number of deaths much higher.
The Arab League finally decided on April 30 to intervene militarily
but only after the British Mandate ended on May 15, 1948, the day the
Jewish Agency declared the establishment of the state of Israel in
Palestine. The US and Soviet Union officially recognized the new state
legitimizing it, and on the same day Arab forces entered the territory.
Pappe details the Zionist leadership's plan and steps it followed to
gain as much of Palestine as possible with the fewest number of
Palestinians remaining in it, irrespective of Resolution 181 it
ignored. They wanted over 80% of Mandatory Palestine or over 40% more
land than the UN allotted them taken forcibly from the Palestinians. To
get it, they colluded tacitly with the Jordanians, effectively
neutralizing the strongest Arab army, buying them off with the
remaining 20% of the territory.
On the eve of battle in 1948, Jewish fighting forces were around
50,000 (increasing by summer to 80,000). They included a small air
force, navy and units of tanks, armored cars and heavy artillery. The
army was comprised of the main Hagana force plus elements of the two
extremist terrorist groups - the Irgun led by future prime minister and
fanatical Arab-hater Menachem Begin and the Stern Gang whose most
notorious member was also a future prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir,
another extreme racist. It also included special commando Palmach
units, founded in 1941 and whose leaders included future Israeli prime
minister Yitzhak Rabin and noted general and war hero Moshe Dayan. They
faced a hopelessly outmanned and outgunned Palestinian irregular force
of about 7000.
Outside Arab intervention only began on May 15, 1948, five and a half
months after UN Resolution 181 was adopted and during which time the
Palestinians were defenseless against the Zionist ethnic cleansing
onslaught against them. Arab states waited because they were
indifferent, and when they finally acted they sent an inferior force
proving no match for the superior Jewish one it faced to be discussed
further below.
Finalizing Plans to De-Arabize Palestine
In December, 1947, the Palestinian population numbered 1.3 million of
which one million lived in the territory of the future Jewish state.
The Jewish minority stood at 600,000. Zionist leaders needed a way to
dispose of this large number of people "cleansing" the land for Jewish
habitation only. They weren't planning to do it gently. Instead it
became a systematic campaign of state-sponsored terror against a near-
defenseless population unable to withstand the horrific onslaught
unleashed against it step by step. It included threats and
intimidation, villages attacked including while its inhabitants slept,
shooting anything that moved, and blowing up homes with their residents
inside plus other violent acts sparing no one, especially fighting-age
men and boys who might pose a combat or determined resistance threat.
Ben-Gurion exulted in the progress as events unfolded with comments
like: "We are told the army had the ability of destroying a whole
village and taking out all its inhabitants, let's do it." Another time
he explained: "Every attack has to end with occupation, destruction and
expulsion." He meant the entire population of a village had to be
removed, everything in it leveled to the ground and its history
destroyed. In its place, a new Jewish community would be established as
part of the new Jewish state he and others in the Consultancy believed
wasn't possible without a mass ethnic cleansing transfer and/or
extermination of Palestinians living there.
Their plan also included cleansing urban neighborhoods that were
attacked beginning with Haifa picked as the first target. It was where
75,000 Palestinians lived in peace and solidarity with their Jewish
neighbors until it ended with the outbreak of violence. It moved on to
other cities including Jerusalem where initial sporadic attacks later
became intense. It was part of an overall initiative of occupation,
expulsion and slaughter of anyone resisting or just having the
misfortune to live on land Zionists wanted for themselves and intended
taking by force.
As ethnic cleansing progressed, it got more vicious as the Consultancy
decided to ransack whole villages and massacre large numbers in them
including women, children and babies. Shamefully, it began and
intensified under Mandate authority with a large British military
presence on the ground to maintain order that never did. It chose
instead to look the other way and let all horrific events on the ground
go on unimpeded. By March, 1948, Plan Dalet became operational as the
battle plan to remove the entire Palestinian population from the 78% of
the country Zionists established as the state of Israel on May 15 when
the Mandate ended.
The campaign included disingenuous rhetoric and propaganda about Jews
in Palestine being under threat from a hostile population having to go
on the offensive in self-defense. The truth turned that notion on its
head because of the military, political and economic imbalance between
the two communities. It was so lopsided, the outcome was never in doubt
as long as the British stayed out of it. They did, and after the
Mandate ended in mid-May it was the UN's problem to deal with. It also
failed the test as discussed below.
Plan Dalet began in the rural hills on the western slopes of the
Jerusalem mountains half way on the road to Tel-Aviv. It was called
Operation Nachshon, and it served as a model for future campaigns. It
employed sudden massive expulsions using terror tactics that proved the
most effective way to clear an area preparing it for Jewish
resettlement to follow. Early on, the plan wasn't to spare a single
village, and orders given to carry it out were clear: "the principle
objective of the operation is the destruction of Arab villages (and)
the eviction of the villagers so that they would become an economic
liability for the general Arab forces."
To motivate attacking Israeli forces, Palestinians were dehumanized as
sub-humans worthy of no respect or consideration making them legitimate
targets for destruction. It's the same tactic US forces used against
the Japanese in WW II, in Vietnam and today in Iraq and Afghanistan. In
each instance, targets were people of color or others not white enough
like Arabs.
Pappe details what he calls the "urbicide of Palestine" that included
attacking and cleansing the major urban centers in the country. They
included Tiberias, Haifa, Tel-Aviv, Safad and what Pappe calls the
"Phantom City of Jerusalem" changed from the "Eternal City" once Jewish
troops shelled, attacked and occupied its western Arab neighborhoods in
April, 1948. The Brits stood aside shamelessly doing nothing to stop it
except in one area, Ahaykh Jarrah, where a local British commander
intervened.
It was a rare exception proving how much better Palestinians would
have fared if their British "protectors" had actually done their job.
They didn't, and the result was anarchy and a state of panic with
Israelis having free reign to ravage Northern and Western Jerusalem
with heavy shelling, pillaging and destruction while ethnically
cleansing the population in eight Palestinian neighborhoods and 39
villages in the greater Jerusalem area transferring them to the Eastern
part of the city.
The urbicide continued into May with the occupation of Acre on the
coast and Baysan in the East on May 6. On May 13, Jaffa was the last
city taken two days before the Mandate ended. The city had 1500
volunteers against 5000 Jewish troops. It survived a three week siege
and attack through mid-May, but when it fell its entire population of
50,000 was expelled. With its fall, Jewish occupying forces had emptied
and depopulated all the major cities and towns of Palestine, and most
of their inhabitants never again got to see their former homes.
Pappe explains this all happened between March 30 and May 15, 1948
"before a single regular Arab soldier had entered Palestine (to help
Palestinians which they did ineffectively when they finally came)." His
account also undermines the Israeli-concocted myth that Palestinians
left voluntarily before or after Arab forces intervened. Nearly half
their villages were attacked and destroyed before Arab countries sent
in any forces, and another 90 villages were wiped out from May 15 (when
the Mandate ended) till June 11 when the first of two short-lived
truces took effect.
The UN's partition plan caused the problem, and yet the world body did
nothing to remediate a situation that was out of control. Early on it
was clear a potential disaster loomed that, in fact, ended up worse
than first imagined. Still, the British through May 15, the UN, and
neighboring Arab states of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq
procrastinated as long as possible before reluctantly stepping in, and
when they did it was too little, too late. Pappe calls Jordan's
(Transjordan then) King Abdullah "the odd man out." He had army units
inside Palestine, some were willing to protect villagers' homes and
lands, but they were restrained by their commanders.
It was because earlier the King and Zionists cut a deal allowing
Jordan to annex most of the land the partition allocated to the
Palestinians that became the West Bank. In return, Jordanian forces
agreed not to engage Jewish troops militarily. To their shame and
discredit, the Brits agreed to this scheme effectively sealing the
Palestinians' fate. Still, once the British Mandate ended, Jordan had
to fight Jewish forces for what it got because Ben-Gurion reneged on
his deal. All along, he wanted as much territory as possible for a new
Jewish state on more land than the 78% he ended up with. The Jordanian
military prevailed, spoiling his plans. It saved 250,000 Palestinians
in the West Bank from being ethnically cleansed the way other
Palestinians were who weren't as fortunate.
As already explained, after waffling during March and April, the Arab
League finally sent regular armies to intervene in Palestine.
Ironically at this time, it was learned the US State Department on
March 12, 1948 drafted a new proposal to the UN suggesting the
partition plan failed and an alternate approach was needed. The
proposal was for an international trusteeship over Palestine to last
five years during which time the two sides would work out a mutually
agreed solution. It concluded partitioning failed and was causing
violence and bloodshed. Pappe notes in the long history of Palestine
and its relationship to the West, this was the most sensible proposal
ever made.
Shamefully it was stillborn because even then a Zionist lobby was
influential in Washington, it dealt with Harry Truman in the White
House, and it succeeded in derailing the State Department's efforts
even though Department Arabists convinced Truman to rethink the
partition plan and proposed a three month armistice to both sides to
consider it. That also failed as a new Jewish People's Board was
created and met on May 12. Ben-Gurion and almost all others present
rejected Truman's offer. Three days later they established the state of
Israel which the White House recognized almost immediately.
The Phony and Real Wars Over Palestine
As explained above, Jordan's King Abdullah cut a deal with Zionists to
get what turned out to be the West Bank in return for not committing
troops to the short-lived conflict beginning in May although Abdullah,
if fact, had to fight for what he got because of Jewish duplicity.
Zionists needed to neutralize Jordan because it had the strongest army
in the Arab world and would have been a formidable threat had it become
part of the overall Arab force that went to war with the new Jewish
state. Their staying out of it was the reason the Arab League's English
Commander-in-Chief, Glubb Pasha, called the 1948 war in Palestine the
"Phony War." Pasha knew Abdullah cut a deal for his own territorial
gain and other Arab armies entering the war planned to do it
"pathetically" as some on the Arab interventionist side called their
campaign.
Cairo only committed forces the last minute on May 12. It set aside
10,000 troops for the engagement, but half of them were Muslim
Brotherhood volunteers opposed to Egyptian collaboration with
imperialism, and they'd just been released from prison because of their
opposition. They had no training, were likely picked as convenient
cannon fodder, and despite their fervor were no match for the Jewish
military.
Syrian forces were better trained, their political leaders more
committed, but only a small contingent was sent, and they performed so
ineffectively the Consultancy considered seizing the Golan Heights
later gotten in the 1967 war. Even smaller and less committed were
Lebanese units most of which stayed on their side of the border
defending adjacent villages. Iraqi troops were also involved but only
numbered a few thousand. Their government ordered them not to attack
Israel but only to defend the West Bank land allocated to Jordan.
Still, they defied orders, became more broadly engaged, and temporarily
saved 15 Palestinian villages in Wadi Ara until 1949 when the Jordanian
government ceded the area to Israel as part of a bilateral armistice
agreement.
Overall, invading Arab forces performed "pathetically." They
overstretched their supply lines, ran out of ammunition, used mostly
antiquated and malfunctioning arms, and there was no command and
control coordination vital for a successful campaign. It showed their
lack of commitment to the final outcome although in fairness to them
their main British and French suppliers declared an arms embargo on
Palestine hamstringing their effort.
In contrast, Jewish forces had a ready source of armaments from the
Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc countries like Checkoslovakia. As a
result, their weapons easily outgunned the combined Arab force, and its
force size outnumbered and outclassed them. Jewish forces were never
threatened, and Pappe exposed the Israeli-concocted myth that the very
existence of a Jewish state was at stake. It never was, and Ben-Gurion
and other Zionist leaders knew it early on.
The war's outcome was never in doubt, and it allowed ethnic cleansing
to go on unimpeded. It spared no one from removal, slaughter and loss
of their homes and land. They were dynamited, torched, and leveled to
the ground to make way for new Jewish settlements and neighborhoods to
be built on vacated land. Still Arab forces continued fighting getting
Israelis to agree to the first of two brief truces. The first one was
declared on June 8 and begun on the 11th. It lasted until July 8,
during which time the Israeli army continued its cleansing operation
that included mass destruction of emptied villages.
A second truce began on July 18 that was violated immediately. The
Israeli leadership was undeterred and continued engaging in widespread
ethnic cleansing and seizure of as much land as possible. Truce or no
truce, the campaign went on unhindered to conclusion that was mostly
completed by October and wrapped up finally in January, 1949 except for
some mopping-up operations that continued until summer.
In September, 1948, the war, such as it was, continued but subsided.
It finally ended in 1949 when Israel signed separate armistice
agreements with its four major warring adversaries. The agreements
allotted Israel 78% of British Mandatory Palestine, over 40% more than
the UN partition allowed. The cease-fire lines agreed to became known
as the "Green Line." Gaza was occupied by Egypt and the West Bank by
Jordan. For the victorious Israelis, this was their moment of triumph
in their "War of Independence", but for the defeated and displaced
Palestinians it became known as "al Nakba" - "The Catastrophe." An
unknown number of Palestinians were killed and about 800,000 became
refugees. Their lives were destroyed, and they were left to the mercy
of neighboring Arab countries and conditions in the camps where they
barely got any.
Toward the end of 1948, Israel focused on its anti-repatriation policy
pursuing it on two levels. The first was national, introduced in August
that year, with the decision taken to destroy all cleansed villages
transforming them into new Jewish settlements or "natural" forests. The
second level was diplomatic to avoid international pressure to allow
Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and villages.
Nonetheless, Palestinians had an ally in the UN Palestine Conciliation
Commission (PCC) that spearheaded efforts for refugees to return and
called for their unconditional right to do it. Their position became UN
Resolution 194 giving Palestinians the unconditional option to return
to their homes or be compensated for their losses if they chose not to.
This right was also affirmed in Article 13 of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights adopted as General Assembly Resolution 217 A (III) on
December 10, 1948, the day before it passed Resolution 194. To this
day, all Israeli governments have ignored both resolutions and gotten
away with it because of support and complicity by the West and
indifference by Israel's Arab neighbors preferring strategic alliances
for their own benefit and writing off the Palestinians as a small price
to pay for it to their shame and disgrace.
The Ugly Face of Occupation
Even at war's end and Israel's ethnic cleansing completed,
Palestinians' agony and hardships were only beginning. Throughout 1949,
and beginning a precedent continuing to this day, about 8,000 refugees
were put in prison camps while many others escaping cleansing were
physically abused and harassed under Israeli military rule. The
Palestinians lost everything including their homes, fields, places of
worship and other holy places, freedom of movement and expression and
any hope for just treatment and redress according to the rule of law
not applied to them. They were afflicted with such indignities as
needing newly-issued identity cards. Not having them on their person at
all times meant imprisonment up to 1.5 years and immediate transfer to
a pen for "unauthorized" and "suspicious" Arabs. This went on in cities
and rural areas as undisguised racism and persecution.
Other kinds of Israeli harshness were also introduced at this time
that all Palestinians are still subjected to today in the Occupied
Palestinian Territories (OPT). There were roadblocks that now include
checkpoints and curfews with violators shot on sight. These conditions
were imposed to make life so unbearable, those subjected to them might
opt to leave the territories for relief elsewhere.
Worse still in 1949 were labor camps where thousands of Palestinian
prisoners were held under military rule for forced labor for all tasks
that could strengthen the economy or aid the military. Conditions in
them were deplorable and included working in quarries carrying heavy
stones, living on one potato in the morning and half a dried fish at
noon. Anyone complaining was beaten severely, and others were singled
out for summary execution if they were considered a threat.
Life outside prison and labor camps wasn't much better. Red Cross
representatives sent their Geneva headquarters reports of collective
human rights abuses including finding piles of dead bodies. Overall,
Palestinians surviving expulsion and now Israeli citizens gained
nothing. They had no rights and were subjected to constant random
violence and abuse with no protection from the law applying only to
Jews. Their places of worship were profaned and schools vandalized.
Those still with homes were robbed with impunity by looters in broad
daylight. They took everything they wanted - furniture, clothing,
anything useful for Jewish immigrants entering the new Jewish state.
Palestinians reported that there wasn't a single home or shop not
broken into and ransacked. The authorities did nothing to stop it or
prosecute offenders. It was like living under a perpetual
"Kristallnacht."
Further, Palestinian areas were "ghettoised" as a way to imprison
people other than by putting them behind bars or in camps. In Haifa,
for example, they were ordered from their homes and transferred to
designated parts of the city, then crammed into confined quarters the
way it was done in Wadi Nisnas, one of the city's poorest areas. The UN
and Red Cross also reported many cases of rape, confirmed by uncovered
Israeli archives and from the oral history of victims and their
boasting victimizers.
Finally, with the war over and ethnic cleansing completed, the Israeli
government relaxed its harshness and halted the looting and
ghettoisation in cities. A new structure was created called The
Committee for Arab Affairs that dealt with growing international
pressure on Israel to allow for repatriation of the refugees. Israeli
officials tried to sidestep efforts by proposing instead refugees be
settled in neighboring Arab states like Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.
Their efforts succeeded as discussions produced no results nor was
there much effort to enforce Resolution 194.
Other issues also remained unresolved including money expropriated
from the former 1.3 million Palestinian citizens of Mandatory Palestine
as well as their property now in Israeli hands. The first governor of
the Israeli national bank estimated it was valued at 100 million
British pounds. There was also the question of cultivated land
confiscated and lost that amounted to 3.5 million dunum or almost
22,000 square miles. The Israeli government forestalled international
indignation by appointing a custodian for the newly acquired properties
pending their final disposition. It dealt with the problem by selling
them to public and private Jewish groups which it claimed the right to
do as the moment confiscated lands came under government custodianship
they became property of the state of Israel. That, in turn, meant none
of it could be sold to Arabs which is still the law in Israel today.
As this took place, the human geography of Palestine was transformed
by design. Its Arab character in cities was erased and with it the
history and culture of people who lived there for centuries before
Zionists arrived to depopulate their state making it one for Jews
alone. They only succeeded partially but managed to transform ancient
Palestine into the state of Israel creating insurmountable problems
Palestinians now face in it and the OPT. In 1949, about 150,000
Palestinians survived expulsion in the territory of Israel and were now
citizens designated by the Committee of Arab Affairs as "Arab
Israelis." That designation meant they were denied all rights given
Jews.
They were put under military rule, comparable to the Nuremberg Laws
under the Nazis and no less harsh. It denied them the basic rights of
free expression, movement, organization and equality with the "chosen
Jewish people" of the new Jewish state. They still had the right to
vote and could be elected to the Israeli Knesset, but with severe
restrictions. This regime lasted officially until 1966, but, in fact,
never ended to this day and has been especially severe since the
democratic election of Hamas in January, 2006 as well as throughout the
Second Intifada that began with Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the
al-Aqsa Mosque on September 28, 2000.
The Committee of Arab Affairs continued meeting, and as late as 1956
considered plans for mass removal of all remaining Arabs in Israel.
Even though ethnic cleansing formerly ended in 1949, expulsions
continued throughout this period until 1953, but never really ended to
this day. Palestinians surviving it paid a terrible price with the loss
of their possessions, land, history and future still unaddressed with
justice so far denied them and ignored.
The theft of their land by ethnic cleansing led to new Jewish
settlements in their place and now are built on occupied Palestinian
land in the OPT. In 1950, disposition of it was placed in the hands of
the Settlement Department of the Jewish National Fund (JNF). The JNF
law was passed in 1953 granting the agency independent status as
landowner for the Jewish state. That law and others, like the Law of
the Land of Israel, stipulated the JNF wasn't allowed to sell or lease
land to non-Jews. The Knesset passed a final law in 1967, the Law of
Agricultural Settlement, prohibiting the subletting of Jewish-owned
land to non-Jews. The law also prohibited water resources from being
transferred to non-JNF lands.
After ethnic cleansing completion, Palestinians remaining comprised
17% of the new Israeli state but were was allotted only 2% of the land
to live and build on with another 1% for agricultural use only. Today,
1.4 million Palestinian Arabs are Israeli citizens or about 20% of the
population. The still have the same 3% total, an intolerable situation
for a population this size. The 1.4 million Palestinians in occupied,
ghettoized and quarantined Gaza live under even harsher conditions in
what's now considered the world's largest open air prison with a
population density three times that of Manhattan. The 2.5 million
others in the West Bank aren't treated much better living under severe
repression from a foreign occupier.
"Memoricide" of the Nakba
Palestinian lands under JNF control also included authority to rename
them to destroy centuries of history they signified. The task went to
archaeolgists and biblical experts volunteering to serve on an official
Naming Committee to "Hebraisize" Palestine's geography. The goal was to
de-Arabize the lands, erase their history, and use it for new Jewish
colonization and development as well as create European-looking
national parks with recreational facilities including picnic sites and
children's playgrounds for Jews only. Hidden beneath them were
destroyed Palestinian villages erased from the public memory but not
from that of people who once lived there who'd never forget or allow
their descendents to.
The JNF website features four of the larger, most popular resort parks
belying and defiling the long history beneath them - the Birya Forest,
Ramat Menashe Forest, Jerusalem Forest and Sataf. They all symbolize
Pappe's poignant prose that: "better than any other space today in
Israel, (these lands represent) both the Nakba and the denial of the
Nakba." Today, descendents of families displaced six decades ago still
live in refuge camps and diasporic communities in neighboring Arab
countries and elsewhere. Their collective memories won't ever be erased
nor will justice be served until they receive redress for the crimes
committed against their ancestors and those still living.
Pappe emphasizes what other regional experts like him believe - the
key to peace in the Middle East is a just and lasting settlement of the
Palestinian refugee problem as well as equity for those living in the
OPT and all Palestinian Israeli citizens long denied any rights and
forced to live in an Israeli apartheid state under harsh conditions of
severe repression.
Pappe believes two main factors deter conflict resolution today - the
Zionist ideology of ethnic supremacy and the so-called "peace process"
that's always been structured to avoid peace at all costs. The first
factor continues denying the Nakba's legitimacy, and the second one
always succeeds in foiling an international will to bring justice to
the region by maintaining a state of conflict to justify Israel's harsh
response to it pretending it's for self-defense. It works because the
US supports and funds the Jewish state allowing it to get away with
mass-murder, property destruction, land theft and denial of everything
Palestinians hold dear including their lives and freedom. Nothing has
changed since 1948 because the West goes along as well as do most Arab
states for their own political and economic gain. Palestinians have no
bargaining power and can do nothing to alleviate their plight.
The UN world body should have aided them but never did. It's flawed
partition plan caused the conflict to begin with. It cost Palestinians
everything, and nothing happened since to win them redress. Even after
its early missteps, the UN might have made a difference but erred again
by not involving the International Refugee Organization (IRO) that
always recommends repatriation as a refugee entitlement. Instead it
backed Israel's wish to avoid IRO involvement by creating a special
agency for Palestinian refugees that became UNRWA in 1950 or the UN
Relief and Work Agency. UNRWA wasn't committed to the Right of Return
and only looked after refugees' daily needs to provide employment and
fund permanent camps to house them. Its efforts amounted to little more
than putting band-aids on gaping wounds still raw and unaddressed.
It's typical of how the UN still operates today under the thumb of its
dominant member country where it's headquartered. It's so-called
"peacekeeping" function is a pathetic and disgraceful example as
keeping the peace is the one thing Blue Helmets almost never do. Its
first ever operation began in 1948 as the United Nations Truce
Supervision Organization (UNTSO) mandated to supervise the armistice
agreements and earlier uneasy truces between warring Israeli and Arab
forces. It's been there ever since, never prevented wars in 1956, 1967
and 1973 nor did it ever succeed in establishing or maintaining peace.
The operation is still active, but it's little more than a pathetic
presence without purpose observing violations on the ground and doing
nothing to stop them or even report them properly to superiors. The IDF
controls everything, operates freely, and UN "peacekeepers" keep quiet
but no peace.
Out of this mess earlier, Palestinian nationalism emerged as the
Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) that became the sole
legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. It was founded by
the Arab League in 1964 and committed to the Right of Return. It also
had to confront what Pappe calls "two manifestations of denial" -
international peace brokers' denial of Palestinian concerns as part of
a future peace arrangement and refusal to deal with Israelis' denial of
the Nakba and their unwillingness to be held accountable for it. To
this day, refugee issues and Nakba crimes are excluded from the so-
called "peace process" assuring there never will be a one unless that
changes.
At first, in the spring of 1949, the UN made some conflict resolution
effort by organizing a conference in Lausanne, Switzerland. Nothing
came from it, however, because prime minister Ben-Gurion and King
Abdullah scuttled it to get on with their partition scheme. Two more
decades were then lost until after the 1967 war when the US got more
involved, began colluding with the Israelis, and couched all new peace
efforts within an overall context of a Middle East Pax Americana. It
meant from that time till now, an equitable resolution of the conflict
and attention to Palestinians' needs and rights were sidelined in favor
of addressing Israeli needs and those of its US partner.
In 1967, Israel excluded the 1948 Nakba and Right of Return from any
peace discussions. Thenceforth, it based all negotiations on the notion
that the conflict began in 1967 when Israel seized and occupied the
West Bank and Gaza in the June Six Days' War that year. This was how
Israel sought to legitimize its 1948 "War of Independence" and all its
crimes it wanted erased from the public memory. No longer were they on
the table to be considered in any future conflict resolution
negotiation. For Palestinians, the 1948 Nakba is their core issue, and
without it being settled equitably there can never be closure or a real
lasting peace in the region.
Nonetheless, by the mid-seventies, the PLO softened its stance enough
to accept a US-led international consensus favoring a two-state
solution. It led to the 1978 Camp David Accords and peace treaty
between Israel and Egypt, but it left Palestinians out in the cold by
implicitly renouncing their Right of Return and failing to address the
issue of an independent state.
The predictable result was festering anger in the OPT that led to the
first Intifada in 1987 that, in turn, led to the Madrid peace
conference following the 1991 Gulf war. From it, the 1993 Oslo Accords
and so-called Declaration of Principles emerged that once again
betrayed Palestinian hopes for redress denied them to this day. Israel
got an agreement to establish a new Palestinian Authority (PA) to act
as its comprador enforcer to control a restive people. All the tough
issues were left unaddressed meaning they never would be - an
independent Palestinian state, the Right of Return, status of
Jerusalem, settlements in the OPT and established borders.
Oslo I led to Oslo II in 1995 and further betrayal. The new agreement
divided the West Bank into three zones - Areas A, B, and C plus a
fourth area of Israeli occupied East Jerusalem. It established a
complicated system of control allowing Israel in Area C to build
settlements on the most valuable land with its water resources mostly
denied the Palestinians. By 2000, 59% of the West Bank was in Area C.
Israel is slowly annexing more of the territory by expanding
settlements and building new ones. It's also getting it by its
Separation or Apartheid Wall on seized Palestinian land, building new
roads for Jews only on more of it, and defining one-third of the West
Bank as Greater Jerusalem.
So-called "permanent status" talks began in July, 2000 at Camp David
that once again resulted in betrayal. Israelis never made a good faith
offer in writing or intended to. They provided no documentation or
maps. All Palestinians got was a plan dividing the West Bank into four
isolated "Bantustan" cantons surrounded by Israeli settlements and
continued occupation with no resolution of their fundamental long-
standing problems and core issues.
Predictably it led to the second al-Aqsa Mosque Intifada triggered by
Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the Muslim Noble Sanctuary on
September 28, 2000 as explained above. It then spun out of control when
Palestinians, fed up with Fatah betrayal, democratically elected a
Hamas government in January, 2006 foiling Israeli efforts to assure
their complicit allies would again prevail. When they didn't, Israel
denounced the results, never accepted Hamas as a peace partner, refused
to negotiate with them in good faith, and acted ever since in bad faith
to destroy Hamas and punish the Palestinian people for their "wrong"
choice. That's how things always work under rules of imperial
management practiced by the US and its Israeli partner complicit in
their collective attempt to destroy a democratically elected government
misportraying them as "terrorists" to get the West to go along and the
public to believe it.
Today, Israel is slowly annexing more of the West Bank in a relentless
process wanting all useful parts of it for exclusive Jewish habitation
only. It made the job easier by defining one-third of it as Greater
Jerusalem while expropriating Palestinian land to expand existing
settlements, build new ones, add new roads for Jews only, and erect the
Separation Wall falsely claimed for security to disguise its real land-
grab purpose plus another way to cantonize Palestinians in isolated
areas cut off from all others and effectively enclose them in large
open-air prisons.
This is part of the appalling daily oppression and persecution ongoing
against Palestinians in the OPT and also against Israeli Arab citizens
living in Israel. Former US president Jimmy Carter pierced the "last
taboo" daring to open a forbidden window on part of it in his new best-
selling book Peace Not Apartheid that got him vilified by the Israeli
Lobby implying he's anti-semitic. He courageously wrote about a rigid
system of segregation in the OPT even though he failed to acknowledge
the same injustices go on inside Israel he called a model democratic
state which it is not.
Palestinian Israeli citizens living get none of the democratic rights
afforded Israeli Jews, and Carter, of course, knows that or should know
it. He distanced himself from that consideration that might have been
too much truth to reveal at one time. Nonetheless, his bold, if
partial, step represents an important breakthrough that may encourage
other high-level officials in the US and elsewhere to add their voices
to his exposing all Israeli crimes demanding redress. They won't ever
be addressed until enough prominent figures step forward to denounce
them and finally reveal their extent to an uninformed public.
Redress one day will come just like it did for Jews no longer
persecuted as they were for centuries. But it won't happen until the
power of the Israeli Lobby is neutralized by forces for truth and
justice surpassing it in power and influence. That day is nowhere in
sight, but when it arrives, Jews and Arabs will again live in peace the
way they once did in pre-Zionist times. It's the way Jews and
Christians now easily mix in the US unlike decades ago when anti-
semitism was significant enough to deny Jews the kinds of opportunities
and rights they now take for granted including achieving positions of
high influence in government, business, academia and other prominent
public and private institutions in the country. There's no reason Jews
and Arabs can't coexist as easily provided there's a will to do it or
events intervene.
An Intractable Problem Caused by "Fortress Israel"
Pappe's final chapter deals with what Israel calls its "demographic
problem" and need to limit future Palestinian population growth. The
problem is an old one understood by early Zionists as the major
obstacle in the way of their dream of a homeland for Jews alone.
Theodor Herzl wrote his solution in his diary in 1895: "We shall
endeavour to expel the poor population across the border unnoticed,
procuring employment for it in the transit countries, but denying it
any employment in our own country."
In 1947, Ben-Gurion adopted his own version of Herzl's solution with
his ethnic cleaning plan that's gone on ever since in various forms
under succeeding prime ministers to this day. It's meant continual
displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank by new and expanded
Israeli settlement developments and Separation Wall land seizures.
Pappe explains the "Zionist project (today is trying) to construct and
then defend a 'white' (Western) fortress in a 'black' (Arab) world. At
the heart of the refusal to allow Palestinians the Right of Return is
the fear of Jewish Israelis that they will eventually be outnumbered by
Arabs." To assure this won't happen, Israel intends to maintain an
overwhelming Jewish majority regardless of world public opinion.
There's no dissent in the West or among most Arab leaders because US
administrations won't tolerate any.
Pappe believes the consensus in Israel today is for a state comprising
90% of Palestine "surrounded by electric fences and visible and
invisible walls" with Palestinians given only worthless cantonized
scrub lands of little or no value to the Jewish state. In 2006, 1.4
million Palestinians live in Israel on 2% of the land allotted them
plus another 1% for agricultural use with six millions Jews on most of
the rest. Another 3.9 million live concentrated in Israel's unwanted
portions of the West Bank and concentrated in Gaza that's three times
the population density of Manhattan. It's made for intolerable
conditions throughout the OPT that guarantee resistance to them and the
same harsh Israeli responses in an unending cycle of violence,
repression and unresolved and unaddressed injustices.
The growing demographic imbalance only exacerbates things, and it's
already a nightmare for Israeli leaders. They haven't gotten enough new
Jewish immigration or adequately increased Jewish birth rates to
counteract it. They also haven't been able to reduce the number of
Arabs in Israel. All solutions so far considered only lead to an Arab
population increase barring mass expulsion or worse some extremists in
Israel favor and one day may be able to make policy unless cooler heads
stop them.
For Pappe and all people of conscience and good faith, there's only
one solution - Israel's willingness one day to transform itself into a
civic and democratic state ending the last postcolonial European
enclave in the Arab world. The Palestinian people will accept nothing
less nor should they, and growing numbers of Israelis are aware of the
horror and injustice of the Nakba. So far, they only comprise a small
minority, but they may hold the key to a future resolution if their
numbers grow enough and they become vocal as is now slowly happening.
Today, however, the situation for Palestinians is grim with
unrelenting daily Israeli assaults against them in Gaza and the West
Bank along with Jerusalem slipping away by an ethnic cleansing process
to make the city one for Jews only. At the end of his book, Pappe
explains "The problem with Israel was never its Jewishness....it is its
ethnic Zionist character." It represents a "tempest that threatens to
ruin (Jews and Palestinians alike)," and it's now raging in the OPT as
it did in Lebanon over the summer where an uneasy peace could again
erupt in conflict on any pretext.
The future of Jews and Arabs depends on finding an equitable solution
to their unresolved problems and issues and avoiding further escalation
that threatens to engulf the whole region in raging conflict if
extremists in Israel and Washington get their way and extend the Iraq
war to Iran and Syria. Kuwait-based Arab Times Editor-in-chief Ahmed al-
Jarallah cites what he calls a reliable source saying a military strike
against Iranian oil and nuclear facilities is planned before April to
be launched from warships in the Persian Gulf that grow in number and
readiness.
He may be right based on former Russian Black Sea Fleet commander
Admiral Eduard Baltin's judgment about US activity in the Gulf.
Currently, US nuclear submarines are maintaining a vigil there and
Admiral Baltin told Interfax News: "The presence of US nuclear
submarines in the Persian Gulf region means that the Pentagon has not
abandoned plans for surprise strikes against nuclear targets in Iran.
With this aim a group of multi-purpose submarines ready to accomplish
the task is located in the area." Admiral Baltin added the presence of
these submarines indicates the Pentagon wants to control navigation in
the Gulf and conduct strikes against Iranian targets.
One other report adds still more credibility to the current danger of
a wider regional war. It comes from former US State Department Middle
East intelligence analyst Wayne White who said: "I've seen some of the
planning....You're not talking about a surgical strike. You're talking
about a war against Iran. We're talking about clearing a path of
targets" against the Iranian Air Force, Kilo submarines, anti-ship
missiles and even ballistic missile capability that could target
commerce and US warships in the Gulf as well as the country's nuclear
infrastructure.
More pressure still is coming from Israeli officials calling Iran's
nuclear program an "existential threat" and Israeli opposition leader
and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu whose rhetoric makes him
sound like he's criminally insane. On January 21, he addressed a
security conference in Herzliya stoking the flames of war by calling
the Iranian government a "genocidal regime" and adding "Either it will
stop the nuclear programme without the need for a military operation,
or it could prepare for it....who will lead the charge if not us. No
one will come defend the Jews if they do not defend themselves." Also
at the conference, US Under-Secretary Nicholas Burns spoke hawkishly
saying "There is no doubt Iran is seeking nuclear military weapons
(and) the policy of the United States is that we cannot allow Iran to
become a nuclear weapons state....Iran has refused to back down in its
attempt to destabilize the region....We have an absolute right to
defend our soldiers."
If the US and/or Israel attack Iran, all bets are off, and
Palestinians already under an Israeli siege will suffer even more. It
means cooler heads on both sides must denounce this kind of talk and
find a way to avoid a wider war and bring the present conflicts in
Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine to an end. It won't be easy at a
perilous time looking like conflict escalation is planned, not its
resolution with the potential fallout from it too horrendous to allow
for all parties in the region, but especially for those suffering under
occupation.
Now there's the further threat of one Palestinian faction facing off
against the other. On one side is the besieged Hamas-led government
already in tatters from months of harsh sanctions and daily Israeli
assaults. On the other are corrupted Fatah forces loyal to PA chairman
Mahmoud Abbas acting as a quisling proxy comprador enforcer for Israeli
and US imperial interests for everything he stands to gain selling out
his people for crumbs handed him and his cronies. They're being armed
to the teeth to do it, and George Bush announced he's helping further
by transferring $86 million to Abbas while starving Hamas and most
Palestinians. It's taken the lives of dozens of Palestinians in recent
days. They're in the middle having no dog in this fight except their
oppressive occupier they want expelled.
They cry out as a colonized people struggling to be free with things
at this stage looking pretty grim. But sooner or later conflicts and
repression end when bloodshed and suffering from them no longer are
tolerated and outside forces see the injustice and futility and are
willing to help. It's happening in Iraq and will in Afghanistan, and
it's coming to the OPT with force strength too great to be restrained.
When it arrives, ethnic cleansing and injustice will end, replaced by
ethnic victory for Jews and Palestinians alike and others in the region
who'll model their own struggle for justice on the one they saw succeed
in Palestine.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at
[log in to unmask] Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.
blogspot.com
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