web analytics

US-Israel Relations: Time for a Reset?

The End of an Era excerpt

The juxtaposition of the American debacle in Afghanistan and the visit of a new Israeli prime minister might foreshadow more about the future of the US-Israel relationship than first meets the eye.

One must first appreciate just how significantly the American “war on terror” helped shape US-Israeli relations, especially by recalling Benjamin Netanyahu’s initial reaction to the attacks on September 11, 2001 to the NY Times:

Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, ”It’s very good.”

Then he edited himself: ”Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.”

He predicted that the attack would ”strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.”

September 11, 2001, which occurred during the second Palestinian intifada, ushered in the period of the American war on terror, one that significantly framed American foreign policy and, consequently, its relationship with Israel.

Understanding this dynamic, the Israelis fashioned much of their messaging to Washington in war-on-terror Manichean terms.

All of Israel’s adversaries—countries and leaders and movements alike, from Iran, Saddam Hussein, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, and even to Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions activism—were painted with a broad brush of the evil of terrorism.

While this black-and-white approach might have been useful for speaking to an American engaged in a “crusade,” as then President George W. Bush put it, it often clashed with the complex and far more gray spectrum of American interests throughout the region.

The paradigm of the “war on terror,” much like that of the Cold War, put the United States and its allies on one side of a divide against its ideologically opposed enemies.

Everything flowed from this divide.

During the Cold War, Israel made the case that it was a like-minded ally to the United States, in a region of strategic importance during global competition with the Soviet Union.

Likewise, during the war on terror, Israel made the case that it was a like-minded ally to the United States in the battle against terrorism, in a region where its wars were centered.

But the period that followed the Cold War was more complicated, and as the United States began to view its interests in the region differently, its relationship with Israel began to evolve.

It is no coincidence that during this time of change, the United States pushed for a peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.

The meeting between Biden and Bennett came at yet another historic pivot point for US foreign policy.

The United States has been at war in Afghanistan for 20 years, an engagement that started in October 2001 as Washington’s response to the September 11 attacks.

Now this war has ended.

Like Iraq, the Afghanistan war has come to be seen as a mistake and a waste of lives and resources; indeed, Americans are now far less inclined to involve themselves in foreign wars.

Support for diplomatic approaches is greater than ever before, and about 35 percent of Americans perceive domestic extremism as a serious security threat today.

The United States is shifting away from a period of massive military presence in the Middle East—during which time Israel has continued to be a key security partner—and reorienting its posture in and toward the region, as it reviews the lessons of two decades of seemingly fruitless war.

The United States is shifting away from a period of massive military presence in the Middle East—during which time Israel has continued to be a key security partner—and reorienting its posture in and toward the region.

A Shift Back to Gray?

What does this moment of reckoning portend for the future of the US-Israel relationship?

The black and white era of the war on terror did not mean the United States and Israel did not have disagreements; rather, those disagreements were obscured precisely because of the security-related issues created by that war itself.

The extent to which the differences between Israel and the United States will give shape to the relationship will be a function of which of three different rough world views Washington follows in the future as it charts the new era of US foreign policy: human rights, realism, or white evangelical Christian identity politics

Human rights. 

A foreign policy that indeed centers human rights, as both US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and President Biden have said they want to pursue, will put the United States and Israel on a more contentious course.

The latter’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank is increasingly seen as consolidating a system of apartheid against the Palestinians.

Realism. With this approach, the United States would weigh its bilateral relationships more directly through the prism of material interests.

If this is what guides the future of US foreign policy, Washington might occasionally disagree with Israel in some areas, particularly around its developing relationship with China or its role in the global arms market.

However, the United States is unlikely to implement major changes in the relationship.

White evangelical Christian identity politics. This is an approach that is closer to what took place during the Trump years.

The relationship with Israel is part of a framework that values ethnic nationalism, nativism, and anti-Muslim and anti-refugee sentiment.

It is also underpinned by a domestic constituency that believes the relationship with Israel is part of a religious obligation.

The Biden Administration’s policy seems closest to the realist middle ground for now, even though it has paid lip service to the importance of human rights.

The Biden Administration’s policy seems closest to the realist middle ground for now, even though it has paid lip service to the importance of human rights.

It is not yet clear how much of that positioning is driven by principle and how much of it is a function of evolving circumstances outside the administration’s control.

The new Israeli government is still only a few months old and this most recent meeting, the first between Biden and the new Israeli prime minister, came amidst a moment of profound crisis for US foreign policy.

Despite this, Biden and Bennett seemed content to move forward with an understanding that little would change in Israel’s treatment of Palestinians; at the same time, Bennett would continue to conduct the US-Israel relationship differently than his predecessor who brought Democrats so much heartburn.

Prospects for Change

How long will things stay this way? While the precise answer may not be clear, there is a sense of which factors may influence US-Israel relations going forward.

First is the growing shift in public opinion, especially among a younger generation of Democrats, toward holding Israel to account for its denial of Palestinian rights.

Over time, that is likely to grow and continue to shape the Democratic Party’s position on the issue.

It may also be accelerated at unforeseen moments, like the escalation in May when Israel attacked Palestinians in Jerusalem and Gaza.

Second, and on the opposite side, is the possible return of a Trump—or Trump-like—administration that would usher in, once again, an American foreign policy guided by white evangelical Christian identity politics.

But such an approach, while paying short-term dividends for Israel, would likely galvanize and accelerate attitudes in the human rights camp.

The back-and-forth nature of American politics could mean several short-term shifts between one or more of these approaches in the years to come.

What is clear, however, is that moving on from the war-on-terror paradigm will reshape US-Israel relations and will make the seemingly middle-ground approach of the Biden Administration less tenable over time.

The United States will find it harder and harder to put off a fundamental choice: to side with Israel’s project of unending domination of the Palestinian people, or to hold Israel accountable for its continuing violations of Palestinian human rights.

Revealed: The Former Israeli Spies Working in Top Jobs at Google, Facebook, and Microsoft

Whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA regularly passes on the data and communications of U.S. citizens to the Israeli group.

unz

The Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) Unit 8200 is infamous for surveilling the indigenous Palestinian population, amassing kompromat on individuals for the purposes of blackmail and extortion.

Spying on the world’s rich and famous, Unit 8200 hit the headlines last year, after the Pegasus scandal broke.

Former Unit 8200 officers designed and implemented software that spied on tens of thousands of politicians and likely aided in the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

GOOGLE

According to employment website LinkedIn, there are currently at least 99 former Unit 8200 veterans currently working for Google.

This number almost certainly underestimates the scale of the collaboration between the two organizations, however.

For one, this does not count former Google employees.

Nor does it include those without a public LinkedIn account, or those who do have an account, but have not disclosed their previous affiliations with the high-tech Israeli surveillance unit.

This is likely to be a considerable number, as agents are expressly prohibited from ever revealing their affiliation to Unit 8200.

Thus, the figure of 99 only represents the number of current (or extremely recent) Google employees who are brazenly flouting Israeli military law by including the organization in their profiles.

Among these include:

Gavriel Goidel: Between 2010 and 2016, Goidel served in Unit 8200, rising to become Head of Learning at the organization, leading a large team of operatives who sifted through intelligence data to “understand patterns of hostile activists”, in his own words, transmitting that information to superiors.

Whether this included any of the over 1000 Gazan civilians Israel killed during their 2014 bombardment of Gaza is unknown. Goidel was recently appointed Head of Strategy and Operations at Google.

Jonathan Cohen: Cohen was a team leader during his time in Unit 8200 (2000-2003).

He has since spent more than 13 years working for Google in various senior positions, and is currently Head of Insights, Data and Measurement.

Ori Daniel: Between 2003 and 2006, Daniel was a technical operations specialist with Unit 8200. After a stint with Palantir, he joined Google in 2018, rising to become Head of Global Self-Service for Google Waze.

Ben Bariach: For nearly five years between 2007 and 2011, Bariach served as a cyber intelligence officer, where he “commanded strategic teams of elite officers and professionals.”

Since 2016, he has worked for Google. Between 2018 and 2020, he concentrated on tackling “controversial content, disinformation and cyber-security”.

Today, he is a product partnership manager for Google in London.

Notably, Google appears to not only accept former Unit 8200 agents with open arms, but to actively recruit current members of the controversial organization. For example, in October 2020, Gai Gutherz left his job as a project leader at Unit 8200 and walked into a full time job at Google as a software engineer. In 2018, Lior Liberman appears to have done the same thing, taking a position as a program manager at Google after 4 years in military intelligence. Earlier this year, she left Google and now works at Microsoft.

SPYING ON PALESTINIANS

Some might contend that all Israelis are compelled to complete military service, and so, therefore, what is the problem with young people using the tech skills they learned in the IDF in civilian life.

In short, why is this Unit 8200-to-Silicon-Valley-pipeline a problem?

To begin with, Unit 8200 is not a run-of-the-mill regiment.

Described as “Israel’s NSA” and located on a gigantic base near Beer Sheva in the Negev desert, Unit 8200 is the IDF’s largest unit – and one of its most exclusive.

The brightest young minds in the country compete to be sent to serve at this Israeli Harvard.

Although military service is compulsory for Jewish Israelis, Arab citizens are strongly discouraged from joining the military and are effectively blocked from Unit 8200.

Indeed, they are the prime targets of the apartheid state’s surveillance operations.

The Financial Times called Unit 8200 “Israel at its best and worst” – the centerpiece of both its burgeoning high-tech industry and of its repressive state apparatus.

Unit 8200 veterans have gone on to produce many of the world’s most downloaded apps, including maps service Waze, and communications app Viber.

But in 2014, 43 reservists, including several officers, sent a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, informing him they would no longer serve in its ranks due to its involvement in the political persecution of Palestinians.

This consisted of using big data to compile dossiers on huge numbers of the indigenous domestic population, including their medical history, sex lives, and search histories, in order that it could be used for extortion later.

If a certain individual needed to travel across checkpoints for crucial medical treatment, permission could be suspended until they complied.

Information, such as if a person was cheating on their spouse or was homosexual, is also used as bait for blackmail.

One former Unit 8200 man said that as part of his training, he was assigned to memorize different Arabic words for “gay” so that he could listen out for them in conversations.

An award handed out to the IDF’s Unit 8200 for clandestine operations, June 24, 2020. Photo | IDF
An award handed out to the IDF’s Unit 8200 for clandestine operations, June 24, 2020. Photo | IDF

Perhaps most importantly, the dissenters noted, Palestinians as a whole are considered enemies of the state.

“There’s no distinction between Palestinians who are, and are not, involved in violence,” the letter read.

It also claims that much intelligence was gathered not in service of Israel, but for powerful local politicians, who used it as they saw fit.

The letter, despite being intentionally vague and not naming anyone, was considered such a threat that Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon announced that those who signed it would be “treated as criminals.”

In short, then, Unit 8200 is partially a spying and extortion organization that uses its access to data to blackmail and extort opponents of the apartheid state.

That this organization has so many operatives (literally hundreds) in key positions in big tech companies that the world trusts with our most sensitive data (medical, financial, etc.) should be of serious concern.

This is especially true as they do not appear to distinguish between “bad guys” and the rest of us. To Unit 8200, it seems, anyone is fair game.

PROJECT NIMBUS

Google already has a close relationship with the Israeli government.

Last year, along with Amazon, it signed a $1.2 billion contract with Israel to provide military surveillance tech services – technology that will allow the IDF to further unlawfully spy on Palestinians, destroy their homes and expand illegal settlements.

The deal led to a staff revolt at both companies, with some 400 employees signing an open letter refusing to cooperate.

Google forced one Jewish employee, Ariel Koren, out of the door for her part in resisting the deal. Koren later told MintPress that,

“Google systematically silences Palestinian, Jewish, Arab, and Muslim voices concerned about Google’s complicity in violations of Palestinian human rights – to the point of formally retaliating against workers and creating an environment of fear…in my experience, silencing dialogue and dissent in this way has helped Google protect its business interest with the Israeli military and government.”

Another link between Google and the Israeli security state comes in the form of cybersecurity group Team8, a collaboration between former Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt, and three ex-Unit 8200 officers, including its former leader, Nadav Zafrir.

Team8’s mission, according to a press release, is, “To leverage the offensive and defensive skills of veterans of Israel’s cyberwar efforts to build new security startups.”

META

Meta – the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – has also recruited heavily from the ranks of Unit 8200.

Undoubtedly, one of the most influential people at Meta is Emi Palmor. Palmor is one of 23 individuals who sit on Facebook’s Oversight Board.

Described by Mark Zuckerberg as Facebook’s “Supreme Court”, the Oversight Board collectively decides what content to accept and promote on the platform, and what should be censored, deleted, and suppressed.

Palmor is a Unit 8200 veteran and later went on to become General Director of the Israeli Ministry of Justice.

In this role, she directly oversaw the stripping away of Palestinian rights and created a so-called “Internet Referral Unit” which would find and aggressively push Facebook to delete Palestinian content on its platform that the Israeli government objected to.

Other ex-Unit 8200 hold influential positions.

For instance, Eyal Klein, the head of data science for Facebook Messenger since 2020, served for fully six years as a captain in the controversial Israeli military unit.

Today, he is tasked with handling privacy issues for billions of users of Meta’s platforms.

Another former Unit 8200 leader now working in big tech in America is Eli Zeitlin.

son in file processing and cloud protection” for the company.

For the last six years, however, he has worked for Meta, where he leads the company in “prevent[ing] data misuse by third parties” – exactly the sort of operation that current Unit 8200 officers likely continue to carry out.

Other Unit 8200 veterans working in influential roles for Facebook include Tom Chet, head of activations and production for North American small business; Gilad Turbahn, a manager for Meta; engineering manager Ranen Goren; software engineers Gil Osher and Yoav Goldstein; security engineering manager Dana Baril; and software developer Omer Goldberg.

Meanwhile, according to Yonatan Ramot’s LinkedIn biography, earlier this year, he was simultaneously working for Meta while still an active duty manager in Unit 8200.

SPYING ON THE WORLD

Why is having former Unit 8200 officers in charge of security, development and software design at some of the world’s most important communications companies a problem?

To start with, one of the military unit’s primary functions is to use their tech know how to carry out spying operations across the world.

As Israeli newspaper Haaretz noted in an investigation, “Israel has become a leading exporter of tools for spying on civilians,” selling invasive surveillance software to dozens of governments, many of them among the world’s worst human rights abusers.

In Indonesia, for instance, the software was used to create a database of gay people.

Unit 8200 also spies on Americans.

Whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA regularly passes on the data and communications of U.S. citizens to the Israeli group.

“I think that’s amazing…It’s one of the biggest abuses we’ve seen,” Snowden said.

The most well-known example of Israeli spyware is Pegasus, a creation of NSO Group, a technically private company staffed primarily by Unit 8200 veterans. The software was used to eavesdrop on more than 50,000 prominent people around the world. This included dozens of human rights defenders, nearly 200 journalists, several Arab royals, and over 600 politicians, including French president Emmanuel Macron, Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan and Iraqi President Barham Salih.

Meanwhile, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi used the software to dig up dirt on his personal opponents. Other members of his government hacked the phone of a woman accusing the Chief Justice of India of raping her.

Pegasus was also found installed on murdered Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, implying that NSO was collaborating with the Saudi government, aiding them to silence dissent and criticism.

Pegasus works by sending a text message to a targeted device.

If a user clicks on the link provided, it will automatically download the spyware.

Once infected, it is possible to track an individual’s location and movements, take screenshots, turn on the phone’s camera and microphone, retrieve messages and steal passwords.

But while the NSO’s Pegasus made worldwide news, another firm, more worrying and dangerous, has flown under the radar.

That firm is Toka, established by former Israeli defense minister and prime minister, Ehud Barak, with the help of a number of Unit 8200 officers.

Toka can infiltrate any device connected to the internet, including Amazon echoes, televisions, fridges and other home appliances.

Last year, Journalist Whitney Webb told MintPress that the company effectively acts as a front group for the Israeli government’s spying operations.

A third private spy firm filled with Unit 8200 graduates is Candiru.

The Tel Aviv-based company barely exists, officially.

It does not have a website.

And if you go to its headquarters, there is no indication that you are in the right place.

Nevertheless, it is widely believed that Candiru was behind malware attacks observed in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Qatar and Uzbekistan.

The company is named after a parasitic Amazonian fish that is said (apocryphally) to swim up human urine streams and enter the body via the urethra.

It is an apt analogy for a firm that spends its time finding security flaws in Android and iOS operating systems and browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Safari, using this knowledge to spy on unsuspecting targets.

The utility of these technically private Israeli spy groups filled to the brim with ex-military intelligence figures is that it allows the government some measure of plausible deniability when carrying out attacks against foreign nations.

As Haaretz explained, “Who owns [these spying companies] isn’t clear, but their employees aren’t soldiers.

Consequently, they may solve the army’s problem, even if the solution they provide is imperfect.”

MICROSOFT

Data from LinkedIn suggests that there are at least 166 former Unit 8200 members who went on to work for Microsoft.

In addition to those already mentioned, others include Ayelet Steinitz, Microsoft’s former Head of Global Strategic Alliances, Senior Software Engineer Tomer Lev, and Senior Product Managers, Maayan MazigOr Serok-Jeppa and Yuval Derman.

Notably, the Seattle-based giant also heavily leans on ex-Unit 8200 professionals to design and upkeep its global security apparatus.

Examples of this phenomenon include Security Researchers Lia YeshouaYogev ShitritGuni MeromMeitar Pinto and Yaniv Carmel, Threat Protection Software Engineer Gilron Tsabkevich, Data Scientist Danielle Poleg, Threat Intelligence Officer Itai Grady and Security Product Manager Liat Lisha.

In Merom, Carmel and Pinto’s cases, they went straight from Unit 8200 into Microsoft’s team, again suggesting that Microsoft is actively recruiting from the regiment.

Other Microsoft security products such as Microsoft Defender Antivirus and Microsoft Azure secure cloud computing are also designed and maintained by ex-Unit 8200 individuals.

These include former Senior Architect Michael Bargury, Principal Software Engineering Manager Shlomi Haba, Senior Software Engineering Managers Yaniv YehudaAssaf Israel and Michal Ben Yaacov, Senior Product Manager Tal Rosler, Software Engineer Adi Griever, and Product Manager Yael Genut.

This is notable, as it was reported that malware likely produced by Unit 8200 was used to attack Microsoft products, such as its Windows operating system.

It reportedly exploited loopholes it found to attack control systems, delete hard drives, and shut down key systems, such as the energy infrastructure of Iran.

BIG TECH, BIG GOVERNMENTS

None of this means that all or even any of the individuals are moles – or even anything but model employees today.

But the sheer amount of people graduating from an organization such as Unit 8200 and going on to influence the world’s largest communications companies certainly causes concern.

Unit 8200 certainly has a reputation for excellence in its field.

The trouble is that their craft includes spying, extortion, gross violations of personal rights, and the hacking of exactly the tech companies that are now hiring them en masse.

This does not appear to be a poacher-turned-gamekeeper scenario, however; there is no indication Silicon Valley is hiring whistleblowers.

Of course, Israel is far from the only country that attempts to spy on foes or manipulate the public.

However, former spies from adversary countries such as Russia, Venezuela or Iran are not being hired in their hundreds to design, maintain and oversee the largest channels of public communication.

In fact, this study could find no examples of ex-FSB (Russia) ex-SEBIN (Venezuela) or former agents from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence working at Silicon Valley corporations.

MintPress has previously documented how, in recent years, big tech companies like TwitterFacebookGoogleTikTok and Reddit have hired hundreds of spooks from the CIA, NSA, FBI, Secret Service, NATO, and other intelligence agencies.

The fact that Unit 8200 is also a recruitment reserve underlines how strong an ally Israel is considered in the West.

However, it also highlights the increasing intersection between Silicon Valley and big government and further undermines any pretense that big tech companies are on our side in the fight to secure and maintain privacy online.

Zionism And Its Impact

By Ann M. Lesch

theodorherzl

Theodor Herzl is considered the founder of the Modern Zionist movement.

In his 1896 book Der Judenstaat, he envisioned the founding of a future independent Jewish state during the 20th century.

The Zionist movement has maintained a striking continuity in its aims and methods over the past century.

From the start, the movement sought to achieve a Jewish majority in Palestine and to establish a Jewish state on as much of the LAND as possible.

The methods included promoting mass Jewish immigration and acquiring tracts of land that would become the inalienable property of the Jewish people.

This policy inevitably prevented the indigenous Arab residents from attaining their national goals and establishing a Palestinian state.

It also necessitated displacing Palestinians from their lands and jobs when their presence conflicted with Zionist interests.

The Zionist movement—and subsequently the state of ISRAEL—failed to develop a positive approach to the Palestinian presence and aspirations.

Although many Israelis recognized the moral dilemma posed by the Palestinians, the majority either tried to ignore the issue or to resolve it by force majeure.

Thus, the Palestine problem festered and grew, instead of being resolved.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Zionism false and failed - Theology in the Vineyard

Zionism false and failed

The Zionist movement arose in late nineteenth-century Europe, influenced by the nationalist ferment sweeping that continent.

Zionism acquired its particular focus from the ancient Jewish longing for the return to Zion and received a strong impetus from the increasingly intolerable conditions facing the large Jewish community in tsarist Russia.

The movement also developed at the time of major European territorial acquisitions in Asia and Africa and benefited from the European powers’ competition for influence in the shrinking Ottoman Empire.

One result of this involvement with European expansionism, however, was that the leaders of the nascent nationalist movements in the Middle East viewed Zionism as an adjunct of European colonialism.

Moreover, Zionist assertions of the contemporary relevance of the Jews’ historical ties to Palestine, coupled with their land purchases and immigration, alarmed the indigenous population of the Ottoman districts that Palestine comprised.

The Jewish community (yishuv) rose from 6 percent of Palestine’s population in 1880 to 10 percent by 1914.

Although the numbers were insignificant, the settlers were outspoken enough to arouse the opposition of Arab leaders and induce them to exert counter pressure on the Ottoman regime to prohibit Jewish immigration and land buying.

As early as 1891, a group of Muslim and Christian notables cabled Istanbul, urging the government to prohibit Jewish immigration and land purchase.

The resulting edicts radically curtailed land purchases in the sanjak (district) of JERUSALEM for the next decade.

When a Zionist Congress resolution in 1905 called for increased colonization, the Ottoman regime suspended all land transfers to Jews in both the sanjak of Jerusalem and the wilayat (province) of Beirut.

After the coup d’etat by the Young Turks in 1908, the Palestinians used their representation in the central parliament and their access to newly opened local newspapers to press their claims and express their concerns.

They were particularly vociferous in opposition to discussions that took place between the financially hard-pressed Ottoman regime and Zionist leaders in 1912-13, which would have let the world Zionist Organization purchase crown land (jiftlik) in the Baysan Valley, along the Jordan River.

The Zionists did not try to quell Palestinian fears, since their concern was to encourage colonization from Europe and to minimize the obstacles in their path.

The only effort to meet to discuss their aspirations occurred in the spring of 1914. Its difficulties illustrated the incompatibility in their aspirations.

The Palestinians wanted the Zionists to present them with a document that would state their precise political ambitions, their willingness to open their schools to Palestinians, and their intentions of learning Arabic and integrating with the local population.

The Zionists rejected this proposal.

THE BRITISH MANDATE

The proclamation of the BALFOUR DECLARATION on November 2, 1917, and the arrival of British troops in Palestine soon after, transformed the political situation.

The declaration gave the Zionist movement its long-sought legal status.

The qualification that: nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine seemed a relatively insignificant obstacle to the Zionists, especially since it referred only to those communities’: civil and religious rights, not to political or national rights.

The subsequent British occupation gave Britain the ability to carry out that pledge and provide the protection necessary for the Zionists to realize their aims.

In fact, the British had contracted three mutually contradictory promises for the future of Palestine.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 with the French and Russian governments proposed that Palestine be placed under international administration.

The HUSAYN-MCMAHON CORRESPONDENCE, 1915-1916, on whose basis the Arab revolt was launched, implied that Palestine would be included in the zone of Arab independence.

In contrast, the Balfour Declaration encouraged the colonization of Palestine by Jews, under British protection.

British officials recognized the irreconcilability of these pledges but hoped that a modus vivendi could be achieved, both between the competing imperial powers, France and Britain, and between the Palestinians and the Jews.

Instead, these contradictions set the stage for the three decades of conflict-ridden British rule in Palestine.

Initially, many British politicians shared the Zionists’ assumption that gradual, regulated Jewish immigration and settlement would lead to a Jewish majority in Palestine, whereupon it would become independent, with legal protection for the Arab minority.

The assumption that this could be accomplished without serious resistance was shattered at the outset of British rule.

Britain thereafter was caught in an increasingly untenable position, unable to persuade either Palestinians or Zionists to alter their demands and forced to station substantial military forces in Palestine to maintain security.

The Palestinians had assumed that they would gain some form of independence when Ottoman rule disintegrated, whether through a separate state or integration with neighboring Arab lands.

These hopes were bolstered by the Arab revolt, the entry of Faysal Ibn Husayn into Damascus in 1918, and the proclamation of Syrian independence in 1920.

Their hopes were dashed, however, when Britain imposed direct colonial rule and elevated the yishuv to a special status.

Moreover, the French ousted Faysal from Damascus in July 1920, and British compensation—in the form of thrones in Transjordan and Iraq for Abdullah and Faysal, respectively—had no positive impact on the Arabs in Palestine.

In fact, the action underlined the different treatment accorded Palestine and its disadvantageous political situation.

These concerns were exacerbated by Jewish immigration: the yishuv comprised 28 percent of the population by 1936 and reached 32 percent by 1947 (click here for Palestine’s population distribution per district in 1946).

The British umbrella was CRITICALLY important to the growth and consolidation of the yishuv, enabling it to root itself firmly despite Palestinian opposition.

Although British support diminished in the late 1930s, the yishuv was strong enough by then to withstand the Palestinians on its own.

After World War II, the Zionist movement also was able to turn to the emerging superpower, the UNITED STATES, for diplomatic support and legitimization.

The Palestinians’ responses to Jewish immigration, land purchases, and political demands were remarkably consistent.

They insisted that Palestine remain an Arab country, with the same right of self-determination and independence as Egypt, Transjordan, and Iraq.

Britain granted those countries independence without a violent struggle since their claims to self-determination were not contested by European settlers.

The Palestinians argued that Palestinian territory COULD NOT AND SHOULD NOT be used to solve the plight of the Jews in Europe, and that Jewish national aspirations should not override their own rights.

Palestinian opposition peaked in the late 1930s: the six-month general strike in 1936 was followed the next year by a widespread rural revolt.

This rebellion welled up from the bottom of Palestinian society—unemployed urban workers, displaced peasants crowded into towns, and debt-ridden villagers.

It was supported by most merchants and professionals in the towns, who feared competition from the yishuv.

Members of the elite families acted as spokesmen before the British administration through the ARAB HIGHER COMMITTEE, which was formed during the 1936 strike.

However, the British banned the committee in October 1937 and arrested its members, on the eve of the revolt.

Only one of the Palestinian political parties was willing to limit its aims and accept the principle of territorial partition: The NATIONAL DEFENSE PARTY, led by RAGHIB AL-NASHASHIBI (mayor of JERUSALEM from 1920 to 1934), was willing to accept partition in 1937 so long as the Palestinians obtained sufficient land and could merge with Transjordan to form a larger political entity.

However, the British PEEL COMMISSION’s plan, announced in July 1937, would have forced the Palestinians to leave the olive- and grain- growing areas of Galilee, the orange groves on the Mediterranean coast, and the urban port cities of HAIFA and ACRE.

That was too great a loss for even the National Defense Party to accept, and so it joined in the general denunciations of partition.

During the PALESTINE MANDATE period the Palestinian community was 70 percent rural, 75 to 80 percent illiterate, and divided internally between town and countryside and between elite families and villagers.

Despite broad support for the national aims, the Palestinians could not achieve the unity and strength necessary to withstand the combined pressure of the British forces and the Zionist movement.

In fact, the political structure was decapitated in the late 1930s when the British banned the Arab Higher Committee and arrested hundreds of local politicians.

When efforts were made in the 1940s to rebuild the political structure, the impetus came largely from outside, from Arab rulers who were disturbed by the deteriorating conditions in Palestine and feared their repercussions on their own newly acquired independence.

The Arab rulers gave priority to their own national considerations and provided limited diplomatic and military support to the Palestinians.

The Palestinian Arabs continued to demand a state that would reflect the Arab majority’s weight—diminished to 68 percent by 1947.

They rejected the UNITED NATIONS (U.N.) partition plan of November 1947, which granted the Jews statehood in 55 percent of Palestine, an area that included as many Arab residents as Jews.

However, the Palestinian Arabs lacked the political strength and military force to back up their claim.

Once Britain withdrew its forces in 1948 and the Jews proclaimed the state of Israel, the Arab rulers used their armed forces to protect those zones that the partition plans had ALLOCATED to the Arab state.

By the time armistice agreements were signed in 1949, the Arab areas had shrunk to only 23 percent of Palestine.

The Egyptian army held the GAZA STRIP, and Transjordanian forces dominated the hills of central Palestine.

At least 726,000 of the 1.3 million Palestinian Arabs fled from the area held by Israel. Emir Abdullah subsequently annexed the zone that his army occupied, renaming it the WEST BANK.

THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT

The dispossession and expulsion of a majority of Palestinians were the result of Zionist policies planned over a thirty-year period. Fundamentally, Zionism focused on two needs:

  1. to attain a Jewish majority in Palestine;
  2. to acquire statehood irrespective of the wishes of the indigenous population. Non-recognition of the political and national rights of the Palestinian people was a KEY Zionist policy.

Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, placed maximalist demands before the Paris Peace Conference in February 1919.

He stated that he expected 70,000 to 80,000 Jewish immigrants to arrive each year in Palestine.

When they became the majority, they would form an independent government and Palestine and would become: “as Jewish as England is English”.

Weizmann proposed that the boundaries should be the Mediterranean Sea on the west; Sidon, the Litani River, and Mount Hermon on the north; all of Transjordan west of the Hijaz railway on the east; and a line across Sinai from Aqaba to al-Arish on the south. He argued that: “the boundaries above outlined are what we consider essential for the economic foundation of the country.

Palestine must have its natural outlet to the sea and control of its rivers and their headwaters. The boundaries are sketched with the general economic needs and historic traditions of the country in mind.”

Weizmann offered the Arab countries a free zone in Haifa and a joint port at Aqaba.

Weizmann’s policy was basically in accord with that of the leaders of the yishuv, who held a conference in December 1918 in which they formulated their own demands for the peace conference.

The yishuv plan stressed that they must control appointments to the administrative services and that the British must actively assist their program to transform Palestine into a democratic Jewish state in which the Arabs would have minority rights.

Although the peace conference did not explicitly allocate such extensive territories to the Jewish national home and did not support the goal of transforming all of Palestine into a Jewish state, it opened the door to such a possibility.

More important, Weizmann’s presentation stated clearly and forcefully the long-term aims of the movement. These aims were based on certain fundamental tenets of Zionism:

  1. The movement was seen not only as inherently righteous, but also as meeting an overwhelming need among European Jews.

  2. European culture was superior to indigenous Arab culture; the Zionists could help civilize the East.

  3. External support was needed from a major power; relations with the Arab world were a secondary matter.

  4. Arab nationalism was a legitimate political movement, but Palestinian nationalism was either illegitimate or nonexistent.

  5. Finally, if the Palestinians would not reconcile themselves to Zionism, force majeure, not compromise, was the only feasible response.

FIRST

Adherents of Zionism believed that the Jewish people had an inherent and inalienable right to Palestine.

Religious Zionists stated this in biblical terms, referring to the divine promise of the land to the tribes of Israel.

Secular Zionists relied more on the argument that Palestine alone could solve the problem of Jewish dispersion and virulent anti-Semitism.

Weizmann stated in 1930 that the needs of 16 million Jews had to be balanced against those of 1 million Palestinian Arabs: “The Balfour Declaration and the Mandate have definitely lifted [Palestine] out of the context of the Middle East and linked it up with the world-wide Jewish problem….

The rights which the Jewish people has been adjudged in Palestine do not depend on the consent, and cannot be subjected to the will, of the majority of its present inhabitants.”

This perspective took its most extreme form with the Revisionist movement.

Its founder, Vladimir Jabotinsky, was so self-righteous about the Zionist cause that he justified any actions taken against the Arabs in order to realize Zionist goals.

SECOND

Zionists generally felt that European civilization was superior to Arab culture and values.

Theodor Herzl, the founder of the World Zionist Organization, wrote in the Jewish State (1886) that the Jewish community could serve as: “part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”

Weizmann also believed that he was engaged in a fight of civilization against the desert.

The Zionists would bring enlightenment and economic development to the backward Arabs.

Similarly, David Ben-Gurion, the leading labor Zionist, could not understand why Arabs rejected his offer to use Jewish finance, scientific knowledge, and technical expertise to modernize the Middle East.

He attributed this rejection to backwardness rather than to the affront that Zionism posed to the Arabs’ pride and to their aspirations for independence.

THIRD

Zionist leaders recognized that they needed an external patron to legitimize their presence in the international arena and to provide them legal and military protection in Palestine.

Great Britain played that role in the 1920s and 1930s, and the United States became the mentor in the mid-1940s.

Zionist leaders realized that they needed to make tactical accommodations to that patron—such as downplaying their public statements about their political aspirations or accepting a state on a limited territory—while continuing to work toward their long-term goals.

The presence and needs of the Arabs were viewed as secondary.

The Zionist leadership never considered allying with the Arab world against the British and Americans.

Rather, Weizmann, in particular, felt that the yishuv should bolster the British Empire and guard its strategic interests in the region.

Later, the leaders of Israel perceived the Jewish state as a strategic asset to the United States in the Middle East.

FOURTH

Zionist politicians accepted the idea of an Arab nation but rejected the concept of a Palestinian nation.

They considered the Arab residents of Palestine as comprising a minute fraction of the land and people of the Arab world, and as lacking any separate identity and aspirations (click here, to read our response to this myth).

Weizmann and Ben-Gurion were willing to negotiate with Arab rulers in order to gain those rulers’ recognition of Jewish statehood in Palestine in return for the Zionists’ recognition of Arab independence elsewhere, but they would not negotiate with the Arab politicians in Palestine for a political settlement in their common homeland.

As early as 1918, Weizmann wrote to a prominent British politician: “The real Arab movement is developing in Damascus and Mecca…the so-called Arab question in Palestine would therefore assume only a purely local character, and in fact is not considered a serious factor.”

In line with that thinking, Weizmann met with Emir Faysal in the same year, in an attempt to win his agreement to Jewish statehood in Palestine in return for Jewish financial support for Faysal as ruler of Syria and Arabia.

Ben-Gurion, Weizmann, and other Zionist leaders met with prominent Arab officials during the 1939 LONDON CONFERENCE, which was convened by Britain to seek a compromise settlement in Palestine.

The Arab diplomats from Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia criticized the exceptional position that the Balfour Declaration had granted the Jewish community and emphasized the estrangement between the Arab and Jewish residents that large scale Jewish immigration had caused.

In response, Weizmann insisted that Palestine remain open to all Jews who wanted to immigrate, and Ben-Gurion suggested that all of Palestine should become a Jewish state, federated with the surrounding Arab states.

The Arab participants criticized these demands for exacerbating the conflict, rather than contributing to the search for peace.

The Zionists’ premise that Arab statehood could be recognized while ignoring the Palestinians was thus rejected by the Arab rulers themselves.

FIFTH

Finally, Zionist leaders argued that if the Palestinians could not reconcile themselves to Zionism, then force majeure, not a compromise of goals, was the only possible response.

By the early 1920s, after violent Arab protests broke out in Jaffa and Jerusalem, leaders of the yishuv recognized that it might be impossible to bridge the gap between the aims of the two peoples.

Building the national home would lead to an unavoidable clash, since the Arab majority would not agree to become a minority.

In fact, as early as 1919 Ben-Gurion stated bluntly: “Everybody sees a difficulty in the question of relations between Arabs and Jews.

But not everybody sees that there is no solution to this question. No solution!

There is a gulf, and nothing can fill this gulf….I do not know what Arab will agree that Palestine should belong to the Jews….

We, as a nation, want this country to be ours; the Arabs, as a nation, want this country to be theirs.”

As tensions increased in the 1920s and the 1930s Zionist leaders realized that they had to coerce the Arabs to acquiesce to a diminished status. Ben-Gurion stated in 1937, during the Arab revolt:

“This is a national war declared upon us by the Arabs….

This is an active resistance by the Palestinians to what they regard as a usurpation of their homeland by the Jews….

But the fighting is only one aspect of the conflict, which is in its essence a political one. And politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves.”

This sober conclusion did not lead Ben-Gurion to negotiate with the Palestinian Arabs: instead he became more determined to strengthen the Jewish military forces so that they could compel the Arabs to relinquish their claims.

PRACTICAL ZIONISM

In order to realize the aims of Zionism and build the Jewish national home, the Zionist movement undertook the following practical steps in many different realms:

  1. They built political structures that could assume state functions
  2. Created a military force.

  3. Promoted large-scale immigration.

  4. Acquired land as the inalienable property of the Jewish people

  5. Established and monopolistic concessions. The labor federation, Histadrut, tried to force Jewish enterprises to hire only Jewish labor

  6. Setting up an autonomous Hebrew-language educational system.

These measures created a self-contained national entity on Palestinian soil that was ENTIRELY SEPARATE from the Arab community.

The yishuv established an elected community council, executive body, administrative departments, and religious courts soon after the British assumed control over Palestine.

When the PALESTINE MANDATE was ratified by the League of Nations in 1922, the World Zionist Organization gained the responsibility to advise and cooperate with the British administration not only on economic and social matters affecting the Jewish national home but also on issues involving the general development of the country.

Although the British rejected pressure to give the World Zionist Organization an equal share in administration and control over immigration and land transfers, the yishuv did gain a privileged advisory position.

The Zionists were strongly critical of British efforts to establish a LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL in 1923, 1930, and 1936.

They realized that Palestinians’ demands for a legislature with a Palestinian majority ran counter to their own need to delay establishing representative bodies until the Jewish community was much larger.

In 1923, the Jewish residents did participate in the elections for a Legislative Council, but they were relieved that the Palestinians’ boycott compelled the British to cancel the results.

In 1930 and 1936 the World Zionist Organization vigorously opposed British proposals for a legislature, fearing that, if the Palestinians received the majority status that proportional representation would require, then they would try to block Jewish immigration and the purchase of land by Zionist companies.

Zionist opposition was couched indirectly in the assertion that Palestine was not ripe for self-rule, a code for not until there’s a Jewish majority.

To bolster this position, the yishuv formed defense forces (Haganah) in March 1920.

They were preceded by the establishment of guards (hashomer) in Jewish rural settlements in the 1900s and the formation of a Jewish Legion in World War I.

However, the British disbanded the Jewish Legion and allowed only sealed armories in the settlements and mixed Jewish-British area defense committees.

Despite its illegal status, the Haganah expanded to number 10,000 trained and mobilized men, and 40,000 reservists by 1936.

During the 1937-38 Arab revolt, the Haganah engaged in active defense against Arab insurgents and cooperated with the British to guard railway lines, the oil pipeline to Haifa, and border fences.

This cooperation deepened during World War II, when 18,800 Jewish volunteers joined the British forces.

Haganah’s special Palmach units served as scouts and sappers for the British army in Lebanon in 1941-42. This wartime experience helped to transform the Haganah into a regular fighting force.

When Ben-Gurion became the World Zionist Organization’s secretary of defense in June 1947, he accelerated mobilization as well as arms buying in the United States and Europe.

As a result, mobilization leaped to 30,000 by May 1948, when statehood was proclaimed, and then doubled to 60,000 by mid-July—twice the number serving in the Arab forces arrayed against Israel.

A principal means for building up the national home was the promotion of large-scale immigration from Europe.

Auschwitz - Latest news on Metro UK

Estimates of the Palestinian population demonstrate the dramatic impact of immigration.

The first British census (December 31, 1922) counted 757,182 residents, of whom 83,794 were Jewish.

The second census (December 31, 1931) enumerated 1,035,821, including 174,006 Jews.

Thus, the absolute number of Jews had doubled and the relative number had increased from 11 percent to 17 percent.

Two-thirds of this growth could be attributed to net immigration, and one third to natural increase.

Two-thirds of the yishuv was concentrated in Jerusalem and Jaffa and Tel Aviv, with most of the remainder in the north, including the towns of HAIFA, SAFAD, and Tiberias.

The Mandate specified that the rate of immigration should accord with the economic capacity of the country to absorb the immigrants.

In 1931, the British government reinterpreted this to take into account only the Jewish sector of the economy, excluding the Palestinian sector, which was suffering from heavy unemployment.

As a result, the pace of immigration accelerated in 1932 and peaked in 1935-36.

In other words, the absolute number of Jewish residents doubled in the five years from 1931 to 1936 to 370,000, so that they constituted 28 percent of the total population.

Not until 1939 did the British impose a severe quota on Jewish immigrants.

That restriction was resisted by the yishuv with a sense of desperation, since it blocked access to a key haven for the Jews whom Hitler was persecuting and exterminating in Germany and the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe.

Net immigration was limited during the war years in the 1940s, but the government estimated in 1946 that there were about 583,000 Jews of nearly 1,888,000 residents, or 31 percent of the total Seventy percent of them were urban, and they continued to be overwhelmingly concentrated in Jerusalem (100,000) the Haifa area (119,000), and the JAFFA and RAMLA districts (327,000) (click here for a map illustrating Palestine’s population distribution in 1946).

The remaining 43,000 were largely in Galilee, with a scattering in the Negev and almost none in the central highlands.

The World Zionist Organization purchasing agencies launched large-scale land purchases in order to found rural settlements and stake territorial claims.

In 1920 the Zionists held about 650,000 dunums (one dunum equals approximately one-quarter of an acre).

By 1930, the amount had expanded to 1,164,000 dunums and by 1936 to 1,400,000 dunums.

The major purchasing agent (the Palestine Land Development Company) estimated that, by 1936, 89 percent had been bought from large landowners (primarily absentee owners from Beirut) and only 11 percent from peasants

. By 1947, the yishuv held 1.9 million dunums.

Nevertheless, this represented only 7 percent of the total land surface or 10 to 12 percent of the cultivable land (click here for a map illustrating Palestine’s land ownership distribution in 1946)

According to Article 3 of the Constitution of the Jewish Agency, the land was held by the Jewish National Fund as the inalienable property of the Jewish people; ONLY Jewish labor could be employed in the settlements, Palestinians protested bitterly against this inalienability clause.

The moderate National Defense Party, for example, petitioned the British in 1935 to prevent further land sales, arguing that it was a: life and death [matter] to the Arabs, in that it results in the transfer of their country to other hands and the loss of their nationality.

The placement of Jewish settlements was often based on political considerations. The Palestine Land Development Company had four criteria for land purchase:

  1. The economic suitability of the tract

  2. Its contribution to forming a solid block of Jewish territory.

  3. The prevention of isolation of settlements

  4. The impact of the purchase on the political-territorial claims of the Zionists.

The stockade and watchtower settlements constructed in 1937, for example, were designed to secure control over key parts of Galilee for the yishuv in case the British implemented the PEEL PARTITION PLAN.

Similarly, eleven settlements were hastily erected in the Negev in late 1946 in an attempt to stake a political claim in that entirely Palestinian-populated territory.

In addition to making these land purchases, prominent Jewish businessmen won monopolistic concessions from the British government that gave the Zionist movement an important role in the development of Palestine’s natural resources.

In 1921, Pinhas Rutenberg’s Palestine Electric Company acquired the right to electrify all of Palestine except Jerusalem.

Moshe Novomeysky received the concession to develop the minerals in the Dead Sea in 1927.

And the Palestine Land Development Company gained the concession to drain the Hula marshes, north of the Sea of Galilee, in 1934.

In each case, the concession was contested by other serious non-Jewish claimants; Palestinian politicians argued that the government should retain control itself in order to develop the resources for the benefit of the entire country.

The inalienability clause in the Jewish National Fund contracts included provision that ONLY JEWS could work on Jewish agricultural settlements.

The concepts of manual labor and the return to the soil were key to the Zionist enterprise.

This Jewish labor policy was enforced by the General Foundation of Jewish Labor (Histadrut), founded in 1920 and headed by David Ben-Gurion.

Since some Jewish builders and citrus growers hired Arabs, who worked for lower wages than Jews, the Histadrut launched a campaign in 1933 to remove those Arab workers.

Histadrut organizers picketed citrus groves and evicted Arab workers from construction sites and factories in the cities.

The strident propaganda by the Histradut increased the Arabs’ fears for the future. George Mansur, a Palestinian labor leader, wrote angrily in 1937:

“The Histadrut’s fundamental aim is ‘the conquest of labor’…No matter how many Arab workers are unemployed, they have no right to take any job which a possible immigrant might occupy. No Arab has the right to work in Jewish undertakings.”

Finally, the establishment of an all-Jewish, Hebrew-language educational system was an essential component of building the Jewish national home.

It helped to create a cohesive national ethos and a lingua franca among the diverse immigrants.

However, it also entirely separated Jewish children from Palestinian children, who attended the governmental schools.

The policy widened the linguistic and cultural gap between the two peoples.

In addition, there was a stark contrast in their literacy levels (in 1931):

  • 93 percent of Jewish males (above age seven) were literate

  • 71 percent of Christian males

  • but only 25 percent of Muslim males were literate.

Overall, Palestinian literacy increased from 19 percent in 1931 to 27 percent by 1940, but only 30 percent of Palestinian children could be accommodated in government and private schools.

The practical policies of the Zionist movement created a compact and well-rooted community by the late 1940s.

The yishuv had its own political, educational, economic, and military institutions, parallel to the governmental system. Jews minimized their contact with the Arab community and outnumbered the Arabs in certain key respects.

Jewish urban dwellers, for example, greatly exceeded Arab urbanites, even though Jews constituted but one-third of the population.

Many more Jewish children attended school than did Arab children, and Jewish firms employed seven times as many workers as Arab firms.

Thus the relative weight and autonomy of the yishuv were much greater than sheer numbers would suggest.

The transition to statehood was facilitated by the existence of the proto state institutions and a mobilized, literate public.

But the separation from the Palestinian residents will exacerbated by these autarchic policies.

POLICIES TOWARD THE PALESTINIANS

The main view point within the Zionist movement was that the Arab problem would be solved by first solving the Jewish problem.

In time, the Palestinians would be presented with the fait accompli of a Jewish majority.

Settlements, land purchases, industries, and military forces were developed gradually and systematically so that the yishuv would become too strong to uproot.

In a letter to his son, Weizmann compared the Arabs to the rocks of Judea, obstacles that had to be cleared to make the path smooth.

When the Palestinians mounted violent protests in 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936-39, and the late 1940s, the yishuv sought to curb them by force, rather than seek a political accommodation with the indigenous people.

Any concessions made to the Palestinians by the British government concerning immigration, land sales, or labor were strongly contested by the Zionist leaders.

In fact, in 1936, Ben-Gurion stated that the Palestinians will only acquiesce in a Jewish Eretz Israel after they are in a state of total despair.

Zionists viewed their acceptance of territorial partition as a temporary measure; they did not give up the idea of the Jewish community’s right to all of Palestine.

Weizmann commented in 1937: “In the course of time we shall expand to the whole country…this is only an arrangement for the next 15-30 years.”

Ben-Gurion stated in 1938, “After we become a strong force, as a result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.”

A FEW EFFORTS were made to reduce Arab opposition. For example in the 1920s, Zionist organizations provided financial support to Palestinian political parties, newspapers, and individuals.

This was most evident in the establishment and support of the National Muslim Societies (1921-23) and Agricultural Parties (1924-26).

These parties were expected to be neutral or positive toward the Zionist movement, in return for which they would receive financial subventions and their members would be helped to obtain jobs and loans.

This policy was backed by Weizmann, who commented that: “extremists and moderates alike were susceptible to the influence of money and honors.”

However, Leonard Stein, a member of the London office of the World Zionist Organization, denounced this practice.

He argued that Zionists must seek a permanent modus vivendi with the Palestinians by hiring them in Jewish firms and admitting them to Jewish universities.

He maintained that political parties in which Arab moderates are merely Arab gramophones playing Zionist records would collapse as soon as the Zionist financial support ended.

In any event, the World Zionist Organization terminated the policy by 1927, as it was in the midst of a financial crisis and as most of the leaders felt that the policy was ineffective.

Some Zionist leaders argued that the Arab community had to be involved in the practical efforts of the Zionist movement.

Chaim Kalvarisky, who initiated the policy of buying support, articulated in 1923 the gap between that ideal and the reality: “Some people say…that only by common work in the field of commerce, industry and agriculture mutual understanding between Jews and Arabs will ultimately be attained….

This is, however, merely a theory. In practice we have not done and we are doing nothing for any work in common.

  • How many Arab officials have we installed in our banks? Not even one.

  • How many Arabs have we brought into our schools? Not even one.

  • What commercial houses have we established in company with Arabs? Not even one.”

Two years later, Kalvarisky lamented: “We all admit the importance of drawing closer to the Arabs, but in fact we are growing more distant like a drawn bow.

We have no contact: two separate worlds, each living its own life and fighting the other.”

Some members of the yishuv emphasized the need for political relations with the Palestinian Arabs, to achieve either a peacefully negotiated territorial partition (as Nahum Goldmann sought) or a binational state (as Brit Shalom and Hashomer Ha-tzair proposed).

But few went as far as Dr. Judah L. Magnes, chancellor of The Hebrew University, who argued that Zionism meant merely the creation of a Jewish cultural center in Palestine rather than an independent state.

In any case, the binationalists had little impact politically and were strongly opposed by the leadership of the Zionist movement.

Zionist leaders felt they did not harm the Palestinians by blocking them from working in Jewish settlements and industries or even by undermining their majority status.

The Palestinians were considered a small part of the large Arab nation; their economic and political needs could be met in that wider context, Zionists felt, rather than in Palestine.

They could move elsewhere if they sought land and could merge with Transjordan if they sought political independence.

This thinking led logically to the concept of population TRANSFER. In 1930 Weizmann suggested that the problems of insufficient land resources within Palestine and of the dispossession of peasants could be solved by moving them to Transjordan and Iraq.

He urged the Jewish Agency to provide a loan of £1 million to help move Palestinian farmers to Transjordan.

The issue was discussed at length in the Jewish Agency debates of 1936-37 on partition.

At first, the majority proposed a voluntary transfer of Palestinians from the Jewish state, but later they realized that the Palestinians would never leave voluntarily.

Therefore, key leaders such as Ben-Gurion insisted that compulsory transfer was essential.

The Jewish Agency then voted that the British government should pay for the removal of the Palestinian Arabs from the territory allotted to the Jewish state.

The fighting from 1947 to 1949 resulted in a far larger transfer than had been envisioned in 1937.

It solved the Arab problem by removing most of the Arabs and was the ultimate expression of the policy of force majeure.

CONCLUSION

The land and people of Palestine were transformed during the thirty years of British rule.

The systematic colonization undertaken by the Zionist movement enabled the Jewish community to establish separate and virtually autonomous political, economic, social, cultural, and military institutions.

A state within a state was in place by the time the movement launched its drive for independence.

The legal underpinnings for the autonomous Jewish community were provided by the British Mandate.

The establishment of a Jewish state was first proposed by the British Royal Commission in July 1937 and then endorsed by the UNITED NATIONS in November 1947.

That drive for statehood IGNORED the presence of a Palestinian majority with its own national aspirations

. The right to create a Jewish state—and the overwhelming need for such a state—were perceived as overriding Palestinian counterclaims.

Few members of the yishuv supported the idea of binationalism.

Rather, territorial partition was seen by most Zionist leaders as the way to gain statehood while according certain national rights to the Palestinians.

TRANSFER of Palestinians to neighboring Arab states was also envisaged as a means to ensure the formation of a homogeneous Jewish territory.

The implementation of those approaches led to the formation of independent Israel, at the cost of dismembering the Palestinian community and fostering long-term hostility with the Arab world.

—Ann M. Lesch

U.S. Tech Industry Outsourced to Israel

Several U.S. tech giants including Google, Microsoft and Intel Corporation have filled top positions with former members of Israeli military intelligence and are heavily investing in their Israeli branches while laying off thousands of American employees, all while receiving millions of dollars in U.S. government subsidies funded by American taxpayers.

Start-Up Nation Central, billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer’s project to bolster Israel’s tech economy at the expense of American workers, was founded in response to the global Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to use nonviolent means to pressure Israel to comply with international law in relation to its treatment of Palestinians:

 

WITH NEARLY 6 MILLION AMERICANS UNEMPLOYED, and regular bouts of layoffs in the U.S. tech industry, major American tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Intel Corporation are nonetheless moving key operations, billions in investments, and thousands of jobs to Israel—a trend that has largely escaped media attention or concern from even “America first” politicians.

The fact that this massive transfer of investment and jobs has been so overlooked is particularly striking given that it is largely the work of a single leading neoconservative Republican donor who has given millions of dollars to President Donald Trump.

Many of the top tech companies continue to shift investment and jobs to Israel at record rates even as they collect sizable U.S. government subsidies for their operations while they move critical aspects of their business abroad.

The trend is particularly troubling in light of the importance of the tech sector to the overall U.S. economy, as it accounts for 7.1 percent of total GDP and 11.6 percent of total private-sector payroll.

Furthermore, many of these companies are hiring, as top managers and executives, the members of controversial Israeli companies known to have spied on American citizens, U.S. companies, and U.S. federal agencies, as well as numerous members of Israeli military intelligence.

This massive transfer of the American tech industry has largely been the work of one leading Republican donor—billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer—who also funds the neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Islamophobic and hawkish think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), and also funded the now-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI).

Singer’s project to bolster Israel’s tech economy at American expense is known as “Start-Up Nation Central,” which he founded in response to the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to use nonviolent means to pressure Israel to comply with international law in its treatment of Palestinians.

This project is directly linked to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who in recent years has publicly mentioned that it has been his “deliberate policy” to have former members of Israel’s “military and intelligence units…merge into companies with local partners and foreign partners” in order to make it all but impossible for major corporations and foreign governments to boycott Israel.

Singer’s nonprofit organization has acted as the vehicle through which Netanyahu’s policy has been realized, via the group’s close connections to the Israeli PM and Singer’s long-time support for Netanyahu and the Likud Party. With deep ties to Netanyahu, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and controversial tech companies—like Amdocs—that spied on the American government, this Singer-funded organization has formed a nexus of connections between the public and private sectors of both the American and Israeli economies with the single goal of making Israel the new technology superpower, largely at the expense of the American economy and the U.S. government, which currently gives $3.8 billion in annual aid to Israel.

RESEARCHED AND DEVELOPED IN ISRAEL

 

In recent years, the top U.S. tech companies have been shifting many of their most critical operations, particularly research and development, to one country: Israel.

A 2016 report in Business Insider noted that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple had all opened up research and development (R&D) centers in recent years, with some of them having as many as three such centers in Israel, a country roughly the size of New Jersey.

Other major tech companies that have also opened key operation and research centers in Israel include SanDisk, Nvidia, PayPal, Palantir and Dell. Forbes noted last year that the world’s top 10 tech companies were now “doing mission-critical work in Israel that’s core to their businesses back at HQ.”

Yet, some of these tech giants, particularly those based in the United States, are heavily investing in their Israeli branches.

For example, Intel Corporation, which is the world’s second largest manufacturer of semiconductor computer chips and is headquartered in California, has long been a major employer in Israel, with over 10,000 employees in the Zionist state.

However, earlier this year, Intel announced that it would be investing $11 billion in a new factory in Israel and would receive around $1 billion in an Israeli government grant for that investment.

Just a matter of months after Intel announced its major new investment in Israel, it announced a new round of layoffs in the United States.

Yet this is just one recent example of what has become a trend for Intel. In 2018, Intel made public its plan to invest $5 billion in one of its Israeli factories and had invested an additional $15 billion in Israeli-created autonomous driving technology a year prior, creating thousands of Intel jobs in Israel.

Notably, over a similar time frame, Intel has cut nearly 12,000 jobs in the United States.

While this great transfer of investment and jobs was undermining the U.S. economy and hurting American workers, particularly in the tech sector, Intel received over $25 million dollars in subsidies from the U.S. government.

A similar phenomenon has been occurring at another U.S.-based tech giant, Microsoft. Beginning in 2014 and continuing into 2018, Microsoft laid off well over 20,000 employees, most of them Americans, in several different rounds of staff cuts.

Over that same time period, Microsoft has been on a hiring spree in Israel, building new campuses and investing billions of dollars annually in its Israel-based research and development center and in other Israeli start-up companies, creating thousands of jobs abroad.

In addition, Microsoft has been pumping millions of dollars into technology programs at Israeli universities and institutes, such as the Technion Institute.

Over this same time frame, Microsoft has received nearly $197 million in subsidies from the state governments of Washington, Iowa and Virginia.

Israeli politicians and tech company executives have attributed this dramatic shift to Israel’s tech prowess and growing reputation as a technological innovation hub, obscuring Singer’s effort in concert with Netanyahu to counter a global movement aimed at boycotting Israel and to make Israel a global “cyber power.”

START-UP NATION CENTRAL AND THE NEOCONS

In 2009, a book titled Start Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, written by American neoconservative Dan Senor and Jerusalem Post journalist Saul Singer (unrelated to Paul), quickly rose to the New York Times bestseller list for its depiction of Israel as the tech start-up capital of the world.

The book—published by the Council on Foreign Relations, where Senor was then serving as adjunct senior fellow—asserts that Israel’s success in producing so many start-up companies resulted from the combination of its liberal immigration laws and its “leverage of the business talents of young people with military experience.”

In a post-publication interview with the blog Freakonomics, Senor asserted that service in the Israeli military was crucial to Israel’s tech sector success.

“Certain units have become technology boot camps, where 18- to 22-year-olds get thrown projects and missions that would make the heads spin of their counterparts in universities or the private sector anywhere else in the world,” wrote Senor and Singer.

“The Israelis come out of the military not just with hands-on exposure to next-gen technology, but with training in teamwork, mission orientation, leadership, and a desire to continue serving their country by contributing to its tech sector—a source of pride for just about every Israeli.”

The book, in addition to the many accolades it received from the mainstream press, left a lasting impact on top Republican donor Paul Singer, known for funding the most influential neoconservative think tanks in America, as noted above.

Paul Singer was so inspired by Senor and Singer’s book that he decided to spend $20 million to fund and create an organization with a similar name.

He created Start-Up Nation Central (SUNC) several years after the book’s release in 2009.

To achieve his vision, Singer—who is also a top donor to the Republican Party and Trump—tapped Israeli economist Eugene Kandel, who served as Netanyahu’s national economic adviser and chaired the Israeli National Economic Council from 2009 to 2015.

Senor was likely directly involved in the creation of SUNC, as he was then employed by Paul Singer and, with neoconservatives Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, co-founded the FPI.

In addition, Dan Senor’s sister, Wendy Singer (unrelated to either Paul or Saul), long-time director of Israel’s AIPAC office, became the organization’s executive director.

SUNC’s management team, in addition to Eugene Kandel and Wendy Singer, includes Guy Hilton as the organization’s general manager.

Hilton is a long-time marketing executive at Israeli telecommunications company Amdocs and is credited with having “transformed” the company’s marketing organization.

Amdocs was once highly controversial in the United States after it was revealed by a 2001 Fox News investigation that numerous federal agencies had investigated the company, which then had contracts with the 25 largest telephone companies in the country, for its alleged role in an aggressive espionage operation that targeted the U.S. government.

Hilton worked at Microsoft prior to joining Amdocs.

Beyond the management team, SUNC’s board of directors includes Paul Singer, Dan Senor and Terry Kassel—who work for Singer at his hedge fund, Elliott Management—and Raphael Ouzan.

An officer in the elite foreign military intelligence unit of Israel, Unit 8200, Ouzan co-founded BillGuard the day after he left that unit, which is often compared to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

Within five months of its founding, BillGuard was backed by funding from PayPal founder Peter Thiel and former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt.

Ouzan is also connected to U.S. tech companies that have greatly expanded their Israeli branches since SUNC’s founding—such as Microsoft, Google, PayPal and Intel, all of which support Ouzan’s non-profit Israel Tech Challenge.

According to reports from the time published in Haaretz and Bloomberg, SUNC was explicitly founded to serve as “a foreign ministry for Israel’s tech industry” and “to strength Israel’s economy” while also aiming to counter the BDS movement, as well as the growth of illegal Jewish-only settlements in occupied Palestinian territory.

Since its founding, SUNC has sought to transfer tech jobs from foreign companies to Israel by developing connections and influence with foreign governments and companies so that they “deepen their relationship with Israel’s tech industry.”

Although SUNC has since expanded to include other sectors of the Israeli “start-up” economy, its focus has long remained on Israel’s tech, specifically its cybersecurity industry. Foreign investment in this single Israeli industry has grown from $227 million in 2014 to $815 million in 2017.

In addition to its own activities, SUNC appears to be closely linked to a similar organization, sponsored by Coca-Cola and Daimler Mercedes-Benz, called The Bridge, which also seeks to connect Israeli start-up companies with large international corporations.

Indeed, SUNC, according to its website, was actually responsible for Daimler Mercedes Benz’s decision to join The Bridge, thanks to a delegation from the company that SUNC hosted in Israel and the connections made during that visit.

TEAMING UP WITH ISRAEL’S UNIT 8200

Notably, SUNC has deep ties to Israel’s military intelligence Unit 8200 and, true to Start-Up Nation’s praise of IDF service as key to Israel’s success, has been instrumental in connecting Unit 8200 alumni with key roles in foreign companies, particularly American tech companies.

For instance, Maty Zwaig, a former lieutenant colonel in Unit 8200, is SUNC’s current director of human capital programs, and SUNC’s current manager of strategic programs, Tamar Weiss, is also a former member of the unit.

One particularly glaring connection between SUNC and Unit 8200 is Inbal Arieli, who served as SUNC’s vice president of strategic partnerships from 2014 to 2017 and continues to serve as a senior adviser to the organization.

A former lieutenant in Unit 8200, Arieli is the founder and head of the 8200 Entrepreneurship and Innovation Support Program (EISP), which was the first start-up accelerator in Israel aimed at harnessing “the vast network and entrepreneurial DNA of [Unit] 8200 alumni” and is currently one of the top company accelerators in Israel. Arieli was the top executive at 8200 EISP while working at SUNC.

Another key connection between SUNC and Unit 8200 is SUNC’s promotion of Team8, a company-creation platform whose CEO and co-founder is Nadav Zafrir, former commander of Unit 8200. In addition to prominently featuring Team8 and Zafrir on the cybersecurity section of its website, SUNC also sponsored a talk by Zafrir and an Israeli government economist at the World Economic Forum, often referred to as “Davos,” that was attended personally by Paul Singer.

Team8’s investors include Google’s Eric Schmidt, Microsoft, and Walmart—and it recently hired former head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, retired Admiral Mike Rogers. Team8 described the decision to hire Rogers as being “instrumental in helping strategize” Team8’s expansion in the United States. However, Jake Williams, a veteran of NSA’s Tailored Access Operations hacking unit, told CyberScoop:

“Rogers is not being brought into this role because of his technical experience …It’s purely because of his knowledge of classified operations and his ability to influence many in the U.S. government and private-sector contractors.”

In addition to connections to Unit 8200-linked groups like Team8 and 8200 EISP, SUNC also directly collaborates with the IDF in an initiative aimed at preparing young Israeli women to serve in Unit 8200.

That initiative, called the CyberGirlz Club, is jointly funded by Israel’s Defense Ministry, SUNC and the Rashi Foundation, the philanthropic organization set up by the Leven family of Perrier-brand water, which has close ties to the Israeli government and IDF.

“Our aim is to bring the girls to this process already skilled, with the knowledge needed to pass the exams for Unit 8200 and serve in the military as programmers,” Zwaig told Israel National News.

SEEDING AMERICAN TECH

webb2x840

Yaniv Bar (l) and Udi Cohen, former Israeli intelligence officers and founders of the start-up Aclim8, demonstrate their co-developed “COMBAR” all-in-one hiking tool for “weekend warriors,” at their office in the northern Israeli Kibbutz of Maayan Tzvi, May 21, 2018. Israel’s military is an incubator for future high-tech firms started by former soldiers. (JACK GUEZ/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

The connections between SUNC and Unit 8200 are troubling for more than a few reasons, one being that Unit 8200, often likened to the NSA, closely coordinates with Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, and is responsible for 90 percent of the intelligence material obtained by the Israeli government, according to its former commander Yair Cohen.

“There isn’t a major operation, from the Mossad or any intelligence security agency, that 8200 is not involved in,” Cohen told Forbes in 2016.

An organization founded by an American billionaire is thus actively promoting the presence of former military intelligence officers in foreign companies, specifically American companies, while also promoting the transfer of jobs and investment to that same country.

Particularly troubling is the fact that since SUNC’s founding, the number of former Unit 8200 members in top positions in American tech companies has skyrocketed.

Based on a non-exhaustive analysis conducted by MintPress of over 200 LinkedIn accounts of former Israeli military intelligence and intelligence officers in three major tech companies, numerous former Unit 8200 alumni were found to currently hold top managerial or executive positions in Microsoft, Google and Facebook.

The influence of Unit 8200 on these companies very likely goes deeper than this non-exhaustive analysis revealed, given that many of these companies acquired several Israeli start-ups staffed by Unit 8200 alumni who subsequently went on to found new companies and start-ups shortly after acquisition.

Furthermore, due to the limitations of LinkedIn’s set-up, MintPress was not able to access the complete list of Unit 8200 alumni at these three tech companies, meaning that the eye-opening numbers found were generated by a relatively small sample.

This jump in Unit 8200 members in top positions at tech companies of global importance is actually a policy long promoted by Netanyahu, whose long-time economic adviser is the chief executive at SUNC.

During an interview with Fox News last year, Netanyahu was asked by Fox News host Mark Levin if the large growth seen in recent years in Israel’s technology sector was part of Netanyahu’s plan.

“That’s very much my plan,” Netanyahu responded. “It’s a very deliberate policy.”

He later added that “Israel had technology because the military, especially military intelligence, produced a lot of capabilities.

These incredibly gifted young men and women who come out of the military or the Mossad, they want to start their start-ups.”

Netanyahu further outlined this policy at the 2019 Cybertech conference in Tel Aviv, where he stated that Israel’s emergence as one of the top five “cyber powers” had “required allowing this combination of military intelligence, academia and industry to converge in one place” and that this further required allowing “our graduates of our military and intelligence units to merge into companies with local partners and foreign partners.”

The direct tie-ins of SUNC to Netanyahu and the fact that Paul Singer has also been a long-time political donor and backer of Netanyahu suggest that SUNC is a key part of Netanyahu’s policy of placing former military intelligence and intelligence operatives in strategic positions in major technology companies.

Notably, just as SUNC was founded to counter the BDS movement, Netanyahu has asserted that this policy of ensuring Israel’s role as a “cyber power” is aimed at increasing its diplomatic power and specifically undermining BDS as well as the United Nations, which has repeatedly condemned Israel’s government for war crimes and violations of international law in relation to the Palestinians.

BUILDING THE BI-NATIONAL ­SURVEILLANCE STATE

To sum up, a powerful American billionaire has built an influential organization with deep connections to AIPAC, with an Israeli company that has been repeatedly investigated for spying on the U.S. government (Amdocs), and with the elite Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200 that has used its influential connections to the U.S. government and the private sector to dramatically shift the operations and make-up of major companies in a critical sector of the American economy.

Further consider that U.S. government documents leaked by Edward Snowden have flagged Israel as a “leading threat” to the infrastructure of U.S. financial and banking institutions, which use much of the software produced by these top tech companies, and have also flagged Israel as a top espionage threat.

One U.S. government document cited Israel as the third most aggressive intelligence service against the U.S. behind Russia and China.

Thus, Paul Singer’s pet project in Start-Up Nation Central has undermined not only the U.S. economy but arguably national security as well.

This concern is further exacerbated by the deep ties connecting top tech companies like Microsoft and Google to the U.S. military.

Microsoft and Google are both key military contractors. Microsoft is set to win a lucrative contract for the Pentagon’s cloud management and has partnered with the Department of Defense to produce a “secure” election system known as ElectionGuard that is set to be implemented in some U.S. states for the 2020 general election.

Top U.S. tech companies have filled executive positions with former members of Israeli military intelligence and moved strategic and critical operations to Israel, boosting Israel’s economy at the expense of America’s. SUNC’s role in this marked shift merits the deepest scrutiny.

The Three Settler Kidnappings Zionist False Flag

Flash Back-NEVER FORGET

Evidence that came to light after Israel removed its gag order on information regarding the June 12 kidnapping and murder of three Jewish Israeli students suggests that it was  an Israeli government operation that was intentionally used to punish Hamas and break up the new Palestinian unity government.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had immediately accused Hamas of the kidnapping — without presenting any evidence — and proceeded to “conduct a search” throughout the entirety of the West Bank until the bodies were reportedly found on June 30th.

The “search” entailed arresting and beating up about 600 Hamas members (including legislators) and trashing about 2100 homes; Israeli forces killed at least 7 Palestinians.

Israel also heightened its daily air strikes on the Gaza Strip, which has been under the Israeli blockade since Sept. 2006.

The Gaza government appealed to the UN for relief, which responded by condemning the kidnappings rather than the massive abuse of the Palestinian population. And then urging “all parties” to show restraint.

On July 1, Israel removed a gag order on information about the kidnapping that revealed shocking facts:

  • The Israeli government had informed members of the press around June 15th that it was aware that the students had been killed (1) but placed a gag order on that information: the government must thus have known where the bodies were.  The brutal “search” was merely cover for punishment of members of Hamas, the democratically-elected party of Palestinians throughout the occupied territories. The Israeli media played along with the pretext for the abuse.
  • The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were only called in 8-9 hours after the first call to report the kidnapping. One of the students placed a call to the police emergency hotline 10 minutes after they accepted a hitchhiking ride home, with the message that he was being kidnapped. The statement was followed by what sounded like several gunshots, groans and silence; the call lasted for 49 seconds. Police ignored the call. The teen’s father called police 5 hours later, at 3:30 am, to report his son missing. “Several hours” after that, after an exchange of 54 phone calls, the IDF and Shin Bet finally became involved. (2)
  • Despite possession of all of the evidence of the kidnappings and murders, the Israeli government has offered no evidence that indicates responsibility for the acts. Those with any direct connection to the phone calls or the finding of the bodies have remained unidentified. 

Prime Minister Netanyahu has used this event for huge political gain:

  • to create divisions within the new “unity government” of Fatah and Hamas,
  • to physically punish Hamas members and the cause of Palestinian resistance,
  • to get legislation passed through the Knesset to block the return of East Jerusalem to Palestinians (1),
  • to try to foment a third intifada to legitimate further attacks on Palestinians (1) and
  • to whip up such hatred of Palestinians that it has become dangerous for them to be seen on Israeli streets.

The Israeli government is continuing to harass and attack Palestinians until it supposedly finds the killers.

The two young Hebron men named as the accused have been missing since June 12th.

The uncovering of this deception should arouse world condemnation.

Arab Jews and Myths of Expulsion and Exchange

By David Green

Quotes one Israeli emigrant from Iraq: “In Baghdad we got along fine with the Arabs. But here we have to fight them.”

During Stanford Professor Joel Beinin’s visit to the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois in March of 2000, I was introduced to the seemingly esoteric topic of the plight of Jews in Arab societies subsequent to the establishment of Israel–specifically regarding his research specialty at that time, the Jews of Egypt.

In Beinin’s outstanding book on this subject, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, he explores the ultimately unsuccessful attempt of 75,000 Egyptian Jews to “maintain their multiple identities and to resist the monism of increasingly obdurate Zionist and Egyptian national discourses.”

Beinin also spoke presciently—6 months before the beginning of the 2nd intifada–of the dire conditions of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, which he described as “worse than horrible.”

Six months after Sharon’s 2000 visit to the Temple Mount, in March of 2001, a political advertisement sponsored by The American Jewish Committee and Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago appeared in the Chicago Tribune titled “The Other Refugees.” It claimed that:

“The Arab onslaught of 1948 and its aftermath tragically produced two—not one—refugee populations, one Jewish and one Arab.

More than 700,000 Jews across the Arab world were forced to flee for their lives, their property ransacked in deadly riots, and their schools, hospitals, synagogues and cemeteries expropriated or destroyed.”

The ad went on to compare the absorption of many of these Jews by Israel to Palestinians who ”have remained quarantined in squalid camps,” concluding that “Palestinian leadership, backed by many in the Arab world, seeks the destruction of Israel through the ‘return’ of the refugees and their millions of descendants.”

This diatribe concluded by claiming that such a return would mean “Israel’s national suicide.”

This bald propaganda has its origins in, among other things, a tendentious revision of the history of Arab Jews, from one of general cooperation with Muslims (also over-simplified) to deep-seated conflict and persecution.

Beinin mentions prominent examples of this revisionism in his book.

In 1974, a Jewish Israeli woman with the pen name of Bat Ye’or (daughter of the Nile) published Les Juifs en Egypte, to which Beinin credits with originating the “neo-lachrymose” view of Arab Jews, often referred to as Sephardic Jews, or more commonly as Mizrahim (Easterners), as they have come to be called in Israel.

Beinin defines two motivations for the popularity of this “normative Zionist interpretation of the history of the Jews of Egypt” and, by generalization, the Jews of other Middle Eastern and North African countries.

First, it served to counter the grievances of Palestinian refugees, by claiming a “fair exchange” between refugee populations.

Second, it provided the Mizrahim in Israel a means with which to redress their mistreatment in Arab countries, and—just as important—to claim a status in Israel comparable to Ashkenazi survivors of European anti-Semitism.

To distance themselves from Arab cultural attachments, Beinin argues, was “the price of admission to Israeli society.”

Beinin quotes one Israeli emigrant from Iraq: “In Baghdad we got along fine with the Arabs. But here we have to fight them.”

While Joan Peters’ notorious From Time Immemorial (1984) was discredited for its fraudulent demographic argument that the Palestinians essentially did not exist, it is rarely noted that Peters also supported the neo-lachrymose narrative of Arab Jewish history.

This narrative has spawned various examples of tendentious scholarship and outright propaganda, some of which appear in Malka Hillel Shulewitz’s The Forgotten Millions: The Modern Jewish Exodus from Jewish Lands (1999).

More important, as Beinin notes, this view was adopted by Martin Gilbert in The Jews of Arab Lands (1976), and Bernard Lewis in The Jews of Islam (1984). In Semites and Anti-Semites (1984), Lewis emphasized, according to Beinin, the “vulgar characteristics of Arab-Jewish relations.”

This discourse suggests at least three areas of inquiry. The first and largest, of course, concerns the actual causes of the emigration of Arab Jews, to Israel and elsewhere.

The second, already suggested, concerns the status of the Mizrahim in Israeli society as an oppressed population. The final topic is that of the purpose of the propaganda itself, in order to explain its relatively recent popular dissemination.

I will briefly address the last topic first by speculating that, to a certain extent, Zionist propagandists have finally given up the ghost and ceased to claim that the nakba can be traced to “Arab broadcasts.”

But while the expulsion of the Palestinian refugees has been at least tacitly acknowledged—if not its willfulness and the extent of its attendant brutality—this has in turn generated an alternative propaganda strategy based on the claim of “population exchange” that was put forward in the AJC/JFMC ad.

It is argued that this exchange has remained incomplete because other Arabs (the same who expelled Jews) “turned their backs on the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who crossed into Arab lands.”

As Palestinian invocation of the Right of Return has continued throughout this decade, the “population exchange” myth and tactic has become conventional hasbara wisdom, casually and repeatedly invoked, for example, in letters to the New York Times.

Ten years ago, American Jews of Ashkenazi origin generally knew little beyond “Operation Magic Carpet” that brought Jews to Israel from Yemen. Now they “know” more, but their ignorance has been compounded.

It has become “common knowledge” among defenders of Israel that the advent of the Jewish state brought, quid pro quo, the brutal dispossession and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Arab Jews within a relatively brief period.

There is little knowledge of the details of this expulsion, and for good reason—the claim does not withstand scrutiny.

A discussion of the second topic, that of the status of Arab Jews in Israeli society, may begin with Beinin’s observations quoted above, but centrally refers to the work of Ella Shohat, a Jewish Iraqi emigrant to Israel and then the United States.

In “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims,” Shohat begins with the observation that:

“Sephardi Jews were first brought to Israel for specific European-Zionist reasons, and once there they were systematically discriminated against by a Zionism which deployed its energies and material resources differentially, to the consistent advantage of European Jews and to the consistent detriment of Oriental Jews.”

In historical discourse, this has meant that by:

“distinguishing the “evil” East (the Moslem Arab) from the “good” East (the Jewish Arab), Israel has taken upon itself to “cleanse” the Sephardim of their Arab-ness and redeem them from their “primal sin” of belonging to the Orient.

Israeli historiography absorbs the Jews of Asia and Africa into the monolithic official memory of European Jews. Sephardi Jews learn virtually nothing of value about their particular history as Jews in the Orient..”

Shohat claims that it is too simple to assert that the “price of admission” for Mizrahim into Israeli society has been to learn to hate Arabs and to simplify their own complicated histories in Arab cultures.

She points out that Arab-hating has ironically become part of the negative stereotype of Mizrahim as defined by “enlightened” European Israelis, including those in Peace Now:

“The Sephardim, when not ignored by the Israeli left, appear only to be scapegoated for everything that is wrong with Israel; “they” are turning Israel into a right-wing and anti-democratic state; “they” support the occupation; “they” are an obstacle to peace.

These prejudices are then disseminated by Israeli “leftist” in international conferences, lectures, and publications.”

The result of this coerced assimilation and continuing prejudice, Shohat concludes, is that “the identity of Arab Jews has been fractured, their life possibilities diminished, their hopes deferred.”

One response has been the emerging notion of Mizrahi identity as a “departure from previous concepts of Jewishness.”

Vital in forming this identity is a more complex historical analysis of the circumstances that led to the emigration of Arab Jews.

Shohat suggests in “The Invention of the Mizrahim” that such an analysis would consider:

“the secret collaboration between Israel and some Arab regimes, with the background orchestration of the British; the impact of this direct or indirect collaboration on both Arab Jews and Palestinians, now cast into antagonistic roles; Zionist attempts to drive a wedge between Jewish and Muslim communities; the Arab nationalism that failed to make a distinction between Jews and Zionists; and Arab Jewish misconceptions about the secular nation-state project of Zionism, which had almost nothing to do with their own religious community identity. Arab Jews left their countries of origin with mingled excitement and terror but, most importantly, full of Zionist-manipulated confusion, misunderstanding, and projections.”

This brings me to a brief overview of the emigration of Jews from various Arab countries: Algeria (1961-2), Egypt (1948-67), Iraq (1950-51), Morocco (1948-87), Syria (1948-56), Tunisia (after 1956), and Yemen (1948-49). My purpose is to refer to some helpful generalizations employed by reliable scholars, and to provide a selective list of references. Even a brief consideration of these points easily dispels the historical assumptions of the “exchange of populations” tactic.

Beyond those mentioned by Shohat, general factors that must be considered in each case include: the changing economic and cultural status of Jews under British and French colonization, especially French (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia); the political relationship of Jews—religious or Zionist, bourgeois, nationalist, leftist, or Communist–to Arab nationalist movements (Egypt, Iraq, Algeria, Tunisia); the influence of Zionism among Jews, before and after 1948, and the extent of the messianic desire to emigrate to Israel (Morocco, Yemen); the effects of Zionist pressure and provocation with the specific goal of promoting emigration (Iraq, Morocco); the effects of ongoing conflict between Arab states and Israel from 1948 to 1967 (Egypt, Tunisia, Iraq); the consequences of the end of French colonization (Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria); and finally the general economic and social conditions under which Jews lived (Morocco, Egypt, Syria). To all of this must be added, in most cases, the cumulative effects of emigration as it relates to what Michael M. Laskier (discussing Morocco) calls the “self-liquidation” process.

Israeli historian Tom Segev summarizes emigration immediately after the founding of Israel, especially in relation to North Africa:

“Deciding to emigrate to Israel was often a very personal decision. It was based on the particular circumstances of the individual’s life. They were not all poor, or ‘dwellers in dark caves and smoking pits.’ Nor were they always subject to persecution, repression or discrimination in their native lands. They emigrated for a variety of reasons, depending on the country, the time, the community, and the person.”

Segev summarizes the “messianic fervor” that led to “operation Magic Carpet” in Yemen in 1948-49, but also notes that the Jewish Agency emissary in Aden, “asked permission to prepare the Yemenite authorities to expel the remaining Jews from their country.”

Discussions of the rapid emigration of Jews from Iraq in 1951 often focus on allegations of violent Zionist provocation, which are compelling but have not been completely substantiated.

Just as important, the context of these alleged provocations was acutely described by the late Rabbi Elmer Berger in letters he wrote on the basis of interviews with Jewish leaders during a trip to Baghdad in 1955:

“Zionist agents began to appear in Iraq—among the youth—playing on a general uneasiness and indicating that American Jews were putting up large amounts of money to take them to Israel, where everything would be in apple-pie order.

The emigration of children began to tear at the loyalties of families as the adults in a family reluctantly decided to follow their children, the stress and strain of loyalties spread to brothers and sisters . . . Several caches of arms were ‘discovered’ in synagogues . . . What both Jews and the Government had believed to be only a passing phenomenon—emigration—began to assume the proportions of a public issue.”

Similarly, the fate of the Jews of Egypt is often linked to the infamous Lavon affair of 1954, during which Zionist agents attacked American installations. But in a broader context, Beinin writes of:

“more than occasional instances of socially structured discrimination against Jews in Egypt. In the 20th century, they (the Jews) were inextricably linked to processes of colonization and decolonization, the nationalist struggle to expel the British troops who occupied Egypt from 1882-1956, and the intensification of the Arab-Zionist conflict.”

Jews, especially those whose Europeanized culture and bourgeois interests linked them to secular-liberal nationalism, were excluded from narratives of both colonial privilege and Islamic conceptions of the polity, and clearly had no place in the pan-Arab movement led by Nasser and opposed by Israel. They identified with the national narrative of neither Egypt nor Israel, and many of the wealthier moved to Europe.

Israeli scholar Michael M. Laskier concludes his description of Moroccan emigration, which was prohibited by the Moroccan government from 1956 until 1961, with this comparison to Egypt:

“Whereas in Nasser’s Egypt, Jews and other minorities were expelled or encouraged to leave in 1956-57 and subsequently as part of the national homogeneity campaign, Moroccan politicians frequently spoke of national heterogeneity, even though Moroccan Jewry was often portrayed in the local press as being disloyal and was becoming isolated from Moroccan society on various levels. The Jews were prevented from choosing the emigration alternative until 1961, because Moroccan authorities expected them to participate in nation-building, to invest their capital in Morocco and not in Israel.”

The long-term and disrupted emigration of Moroccan Jews stands in stark contrast to the “flash flood” of Algerian Jews, most of who immigrated to France after Algerian independence in 1962. Algerian Jews were more completely assimilated into French colonial culture, but nevertheless historically attached to Muslim society. Andre Chouraqui writes that “heavy pressure was applied (to Jews) from both sides in the hope of gaining both material and moral support; . . . the vast majority of Jews remained passive in the struggle.” Ultimately, FLN (liberation) attacks not specifically directed at Jews spread panic among both the Jewish and Christian elite, and “Jews saw headlong flight as the only escape from anarchy.” Chouraqui concludes that in North Africa,

“neither the westernized elite nor the masses of Moslems, who were almost entirely ignorant of the implications of Zionism, reacted with great feelings against their countries’ Jews. Had it not been for the conflict with the French…the Jews might well have remained in North Africa for centuries in comparative harmony.”

The disintegration of Jewish cultures in Arab societies was a complicated and by no means inevitable process that has been neither properly understood nor appropriately mourned by its victims, other Jewish Israelis, and Jews of European background around the world. Its use as Zionist propaganda by the Ashkenazi elite in Israel and the U.S. reflects various degrees of racism towards Mizrahim, Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, and serves to harden the false bipolarity with which Israelis and their American supporters view the world, now through the lenses of “Judeo-Christian” civilization. The specter of the Holocaust has been unfairly transferred to the Arab world, and is used to justify the oppression of the Palestinians and the “war on terrorism.” While Arab Jewish culture has been transformed in the Diaspora, an understanding of their history and demise can begin a process that will allow the Mizrahim to more actively shape a more just Israeli society, and a more peaceful future among Israelis, Palestinians, and other Arabs. In our own country, it can be minimally hoped that debunking mythology about Arab Jews will open some minds to a more fundamental questioning of Zionist conventional wisdom and its relation to American empire.

The Nazi-inspired Pogrom That Triggered Iraqi Jews’ “Escape to Israel”

by Naeim Giladi

The Link interviewed Naeim Giladi, a Jew from Iraq, for three hours on March 16, 1998, two days prior to his 69th birthday.

For nearly two other delightful hours, we were treated to a multi-course Arabic meal prepared by his wife Rachael, who is also Iraqi.

“It’s our Arab culture,” he said proudly.

THE JEWS OF IRAQ

By Naeim Giladi

My Story

Of course I thought I knew it all back then. I was young, idealistic, and more than willing to put my life at risk for my convictions.

It was 1947 and I wasn’t quite 18 when the Iraqi authorities caught me for smuggling young Iraqi Jews like myself out of Iraq, into Iran, and then on to the Promised Land of the soon-to-be established Israel.

Then, through the Jewish Agency, I was advised to go to al-Majdal (later renamed Ashkelon), an Arab town about 9 miles from Gaza, very close to the Mediterranean.

I was disillusioned at what I found in the Promised Land, disillusioned personally, disillusioned at the institutionalized racism, disillusioned at what I was beginning to learn about Zionism’s cruelties.

* Vladimir Jabotinsky, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s ideological progenitor, frankly admitted that such a transfer of populations could only be brought about by force.

British Leaders:
Britain always acted in its best colonial interests.

For that reason Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour sent his famous 1917 letter to Lord Rothschild in exchange for Zionist support in WW I.

During WW II the British were primarily concerned with keeping their client states in the Western camp, while Zionists were most concerned with the immigration of European Jews to Palestine, even if this meant cooperating with the Nazis.

(In my book I document numerous instances of such dealings by Ben Gurion and the Zionist leadership.)

El-Said then went to his back-up plan and began to create the conditions that would make the lives of Iraqi Jews so miserable they would leave for Israel.

Jewish government employees were fired from their jobs; Jewish merchants were denied import/export licenses; police began to arrest Jews for trivial reasons. Still the Jews did not leave in any great numbers.

Oppression And Land Theft Bring Shame To Zionists

The Holocaust and the Nakba: The Jew as the Arab | Palestine | Al Jazeera

Zionist Palestine not Nazi Europe

By 

How can Israelis close their eyes to the violent abuses inflicted by Israel’s military against the Palestinians?

They live in an artificial world of denial — bolstered by a mastery of communications and the dysfunctionality of Palestinian activists — in which abuses against Palestinians such as racism, land theft, physical violence and killings take place every day.

These actions do not even provoke a whimper from the majority of Israel’s Jews.

They have come to accept the fact that their country is one built on the oppression of others, while going to great lengths to separate its viciousness from that which fueled the Holocaust, which brought many of them into the initially welcoming arms of Palestine’s Christians and Muslims.

They may argue that not all Jews in Israel have turned their backs on righteousness. But that was also the response of populations in Germany and in Poland during the Second World War. Not everyone hated Jews, but very few spoke out until it was too late.

That is where Israelis are headed: Toward a fate in which one day they will have to answer for the atrocities that have taken place against Palestinians.

The newly announced investigation by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which was itself founded on principles defined by the postwar trials of the Nazis, is just the beginning.

Every day, Palestinian lands are being confiscated for the sole purpose of expanding the existing and building new Jewish-only settlements.

The best farmlands are taken from Palestinians with impunity.

Reports frequently make it through the Israeli government-throttled mainstream news media about Palestinians who are attacked, brutalized and killed by Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank.

And yet Israeli Jews still manage to go about their business in places like West Jerusalem, where they openly refer to the big houses built using Jerusalem stone as “Arab homes.”

There is absolutely no shame, especially as Israeli Jews lead the campaign to recover land and property stolen from them during the Holocaust.

As they do so, land and property is being stolen from the Palestinians in their name. And their major institutions don’t seem to care.

For Palestinians, March is a special month, during which they commemorate “Land Day.”

This commemoration reflects on when — March 30, 1976 — the Israeli government passed a law allowing the expropriation of lands from non-Jews.

Protests by Palestinian citizens of Israel raged from Nazareth to the Negev.

It was the first time that Israel’s non-Jewish population had stood up to the racism on which Israel is based.

B’Tselem, an organization of Israelis of all backgrounds who embrace human rights, this month released a scathing report on how extensive the theft of land is.

It argues: “The fact that the West Bank has not been formally annexed does not stop Israel from treating it as if it were its own territory, particularly when it comes to the massive resources Israel invests in developing settlements and establishing infrastructure to serve their residents.”

The report adds: “This policy has enabled the establishment of more than 280 settlements and outposts now populated by more than 440,000 Israeli citizens (excluding East Jerusalem).

Thanks to this policy, more than 2 million dunams of Palestinian land have been stolen, by official and unofficial means.

The West Bank is crisscrossed with roads linking the settlements to one another and to Israel’s sovereign territory, west of the Green Line; and the area is dotted with Israeli industrial zones.”

These industrial areas produce stolen products that are then disguised and sold to markets around the world — a process that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement seeks to expose.

Israel may be able to change the face of the West Bank, just as it has meticulously erased much of the Arab identity from areas throughout Israel, but it cannot erase the truth, which will always stand as a testament to its cruelty.

Israelis are accountable for the horrors from their government.

Israel is a World Zionist Occupied Nation

Israelis need to wake up and learn the facts about their Khazarian blood heritage and the fact that the latest peer-reviewed Johns Hopkins genetic study shows that: about 97.5% have absolutely no ancient Hebrew blood at all, are not Semites, their Khazarian ancestors converted to a perverted form of Judaism under King Bulan in about 750 AD, and thus they have no ancient right to any of Palestinian land; while 80%+ of the Palestinians are true Semites because they carry ancient Hebrew Blood and these Semites do have an ancestral right to all of Palestine.

by Preston James and Mike Harris

The new nation-state of Israel was illegally set up after WWII by World Zionists who hijacked it in 1815. 

The Rothschild World Zionist Money-changers were able to hijack by deploying a very crafty covert op using the fake news that Napoleon had won at Waterloo, when he was actually defeated.

This fake news sent by carrier pigeon was released early before true reports were received of Napoleon’s defeat.

This allowed Nathan Rothschild to collapse the British markets and buy up and gain control of most business and banking at a fraction of their value.

The stated reason these British based World Zionist Kingpins seized Palestinian lands illegally and gave it to these Judaics was to compensate for the Nazi Work Camps and persecution of Judaics in Europe.

Giving the Judaics back their falsely claimed homeland in Palestine was proposed as an equitable compensation for these persecuted Judaics, almost all of whom were actually Khazarians in the first place.

This whole strategy was, of course, conceived of and actuated by the World Zionists.

The real reasons these World Zionists mandated a small part of Palestine to be seized and gifted to these displaced European Khazarians turned out to be something far more sinister than helping their so-called fellow “displaced, persecuted and victimized” Judaics.

The roundup and placement of Judaics in Work Camps by Nazis provided a golden opportunity for the World Zionists (WZs) to mind-kontrol these displaced Khazarian Judaics into falsely believing they deserved to have Palestine.

The false-narrative presented to do this was that “this is where you came from in the first place”.

This claim turns out to be one of the biggest lies ever told and has caused the genocide and mass suffering of millions of Palestinians who have had their ancestral lands stolen from them by World Zionists and “given” to Khazarian to call their own Biblical land.

And we know now that this claim was an obvious falsity because recent peer-reviewed Johns Hopkins genetic research has shown that 97.5% of these Judaics living in Israel actually have no ancient Hebrew Blood at all, none.

This false claim that these persecuted European Judaics of WWII had ancient ancestral rights to Palestine was, of course, a stupendous Big Lie.

It was a very effective means to mind-kontrol these displaced Khazarians, fool them, and to use them to create a none-existent new race called “Jews”.

This false claim was an effective means to Mind-kontrol Khazarian Judaics whose bloodlines originated in King Bulan’s Khazaria and transformed them into a new protected race called “Jews”.

And this new racial designation “Jew” could be used to make them believe they were a special race, God’s chosen ones, the ancient Hebrews when all they shared was a conversion to Judaism not based on any ancient genetic bloodlines.

This World Zionist “con job” of the new racial designation “Jew” was very effective in Mind-kontrolling these Khazarians into believing that they deserved special protection for all future time from any criticism.

The World Zionists (WZs) successfully convinced these persecuted Khazarians that they had already suffered as a people far too much in WWII.

So when they would be later used as highly placed cutouts and tools for the World Zionists to fulfill their secret evil NWO agenda to destroy all societies, no criticism would be allowed.

And the WZs would make sure that the top positions in government and very lucrative business opportunities would be offered to them first as members of this new artificial racial tribe that Khazarian King Bulan had labeled as “Jews”.

Certain selected leaders of this new racial tribe would thus become handsomely rewarded as they became initiated into the secret Babylonian Talmudic system of Money-Magick and Baal worship.

*

The concept Antisemitism as sophisticated WZ Mind-kontrol and the perfect defense against any criticism from “Goyim”.

Thus the WZs created the concept “Antisemitism” was to shield these Khazarians who now called themselves “Jews” from any criticism or prosecution for any of their crimes, tyranny or oppression of others such as continued land theft of Palestinian land, blockading and genocide of Palestinians and the mass-murder and suffering of 9-11-01 and all their wars.

Of course, this defense has now been shown to be nonsense for Judaics since almost all are Khazarians. But this has been claimed as Judaics’ main defense for Israel tyranny and genocide of Palestinians and theft of their land.

Anyone who has studied mind-kontrol technology in detail knows that in classic MK-Ultra (satanic or occult Babylonian Talmudic) the first step in to render the subject in a state of shock using major blood trauma, severe suffering with no escape.

This step places subjects in a very suggestible state so they will easily be conditioned by the master controller. This process can be done to large groups at once  by any government or rogue group.

They are East Europeans and Russians. Not a Semitic drop of blood between them.

The photo of  Russian-born David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and defense minister, and his wife is from the first Israel Defense Forces parade in July 1948.

Mind-kontrol is the reason of course that the False Flag of 9-11-01 was used by World Zionists to place the American People in a state of Blood Shock.

This made them intensely suggestible and ready to be mass hypnotized by the USG that a foreign war on Terror in the Mideast being secretly waged for WZs costing Trillions of US Dollars and thousands of American soldiers’ lives and futures was necessary.

Of course, all such mass hypnosis is always predicated on a Big Lies, false-narratives, and government propaganda.

No matter how big the lie, the American masses can be effectively mind-kontrolled to believe them if they are repeatedly broadcast and published by all of the “big six” Major Mass Media which actually serve as WZ mouthpieces.

For 9-11-01, the World Zionist-controlled Major Mass Media quickly declared that Osama bin Laden did it on behalf of Afghanistan and unless we declared an international war on terror and stopped it over there in the Mideast at its origin, much more and even worse attacks from these crazy Islamics were sure to come to America.

*

How post-WW2 Israel was created using lands stolen from Palestinians.

The British Rothschilds arranged for the Balfour Declaration and later moved these European Judaics (most actually were Khazarians) to a small part of Palestine that England illegally seized from Palestinians.

The Judaics were supposed to stay in a small designated land area, but quickly formed terrorists groups to  murder Palestinians and steal more land. The British peace-keepers were blown up in their hotel and driven out by these Judaic terror groups.

The World Zionist leaders that ran this new illegal nation-state comprised of stolen Palestinian ancestral lands name it “Israel” like the ancient 12 tribes of Hebrews were called.

This was done to keep these Khazarian settlers fooled into believing this Big Lie that they were of ancient Hebrew Blood and were a racially pure nation-state. Note that in the Torah Israel referred to the Twelve Hebrew Tribes as Israel, not a country.

The World Zionists who are actually secret followers of Babylonian Talmudism are best defined as Satanists and occult masters of the Black Magick, Money Magick, and the Black Arts of ancient Babylon.

These Babylonian Talmudics (BTs) are a very crafty bunch and some have claimed to be anointed by Satan who they claim is the ruler of this world and is now rising to dethrone and become God Almighty himself.

Other BT’s believe that Satan (Lucifer) actually is God Almighty now and empowers those that are chosen by him, and willing to give him their souls in exchange for extreme power, riches, and status and are also willing to break all societal norms laws when necessary to serve Satan’s will.

The term “Jew” was actually first used in Khazaria in about 750 AD after King Bulan selected Judaism as Khazaria’s national religion.

Before that those that were believers in Judaism in Palestine were called Hebrews. After 750, most Hebrews were seduced into calling themselves “Jews” along with the much larger number of Khazarians (aka Ashkenazis). It is important to note that the Tribe of Judah was only one of the Twelve Hebrew Tribes and Khazarians have no blood relation to any of these tribes including the Tribe of Judah.

The history of the Hebrew Tribes after they gained their Promised Land is complex. Basically the Ten Tribes split from two tribes.

Some true Hebrew (non-Khazarian) Torah scholars believe that God Almighty divorced himself from the Twelve Hebrew Tribes and removed his gift of the promised land to them for their continued unrepentant idolatry.

Most of these true Hebrew Torah scholars do not believe that the new nation of Israel has any right to exist in Palestine and blame it all on WZs for setting this great lie up in the first place.

These particular Hebrew Torah scholars are dead set against World Zionism and all its evil works.

World Zionists (BTs) set up various rules to define this new artificial race (“Jew”) that they created in Khazaria in 750 AD and falsely claimed it came from ancient Hebrew Bloodlines. BTs defined what a real “Jew” was, including one must have a “Jewish” mother. It didn’t matter if the father was Jewish. This was done to protect any Jewish philandering males from blow-back due to fathering an illegitimate child from a Goyim woman.

The WZs convinced (mind-kontrolled) these displaced European Judaics of WWII that they were from ancient Hebrew Bloodlines when they were actually from Khazarian bloodlines from ancient Khazaria.

Khazarians have sometimes been called Askenazis. This was the first step in creating this new artificial race of Jews and a new racially pure nation based on this Big Lie.

Khazarian King Bulan ordered his people to accept his choice of new national religion which was actually a perverted form of Judaism based on Babylonian Talmudism in about 750 AD.

Fortunately, most Khazarians are secular and do not practice the Babylonian Talmudism that characterized the form of Judaism King Bulan accepted and practiced.

The WZs desired to set up Israel as a nation of Fake Hebrews (Revelation 2:9 and 3:9) to serve as their key action-agents and also as a world sanctuary and base of operations for the Rothschild Khazarian Mafia (RKM).

The mass deaths of Judaics in WWII and the Nazi Work Camps was then used by the WZs (BTs) to create this new mass role of victim for Judaics. Judaics were thus transformed forever into a special class of the persecuted that the whole world must defer to and protect forever.

“Never Again” became the Judaic motto. No criticism in any form would be allowed and this would be labeled as a new social offense called “Antisemitism”. This new worldwide standard for protecting this new synthetically created racial tribe of “Jews” from any criticism or further persecution became law in many nations, especially in Canada and Europe due to WZ money power and purchased political influence.

The bottom line to all this is that the WZ creation of this synthetic new Tribal race called “Jews” provided great cover for WZs who were committed to: secretly practicing (without discovery) Babylonian Talmudism (Satanism) with child and human sacrifice; anti-human pernicious usury-based Money-Magick; and destroying every society on Planet Earth in order to create their Satanic NWO system.

The problem is that since 97.5% of these Judaics living in Israel are Khazarian blood (not Hebrew blood) like most living in America.

It’s a sad fact that the WZs who created private Fiat pernicious usury central banking has appointed Khazarians as well paid cutouts to sell their nations out and run these WZ central banking systems.

These Cutouts are usually Khazarians who wrongly refer to themselves as Jews.

To prevent any discussion or mass protests against the WZ hijacking and Bankster abuse of America by Khazarian Cutouts, Antisemitism has been fully utilized.

Although any reasonable person knows that not all Khazarians are bad people, but certainly the evidence now available suggests that all WZs who are BTs are Satanists and by definition, anti-society, anti-human, sociopathic and pro-mass-death for their own gain.

And that all Khazarians who serve as highly paid WZ Cutouts are habitual violators of the US Constitution and numerous US Law including RICO which are major felonies.

The Rothschild Khazarian Mafia (RKM) is the core group of Babylonian Talmudics running this new and illegal racist nation of Israel.

The RKM is also known as the World Money Changers and runs the Satanic Pedophile Network. They are also the World Zionists.

Rothschild Khazarian Mafia (RKM) Money Power provides the muscle for World Zionism.

Creating and controlling most of the world’s money has provided a lot of continuing power and that is what these World Zionist do by issuing debt-notes no longer backed by any real commodities, gold or silver.

These WZ/BT World Moneychangers lend these debt notes (which are required by law to be accepted as “legal tender”) to the masses and charge pernicious usury (illegal under the Torah Law itself).

Obviously money should be owned by any nations own citizens in the first place, should be real, and no interest should be charged for using it, especially for these fake money debt-notes.

Obviously this RKM money-power Fiat central private banking system is the biggest scam in history.

It has enabled the World Zionists to infiltrate and hijack many nations such as America and then use them to stage wars to make massive profits.

WZ money power is now in the process of being displaced by nations grouping together such as the BRICS.

It makes take several years or it makes happen anytime overnight, but the RKM private Fiat central Banking system and the US Petrodollar, its illegitimate child, are going down for the count.

*

The post-WWII creation of the nation-state of Israel was based on a colossal lie and major land theft and genocide against the Palestinian People.

Yes, the post-WWII nation-state of Israel was created on one of the greatest lies ever told and is nothing more than high-level land theft by the world’s largest organized crime Syndicate, the Rothschild Khazarian Mafia (RKM).

And this RKM are hardcore World Zionists who take their orders from a small secret satanic group the top Babylonian Talmudics (BTs).

Top BTs have claimed to be directly powered by pure satanic and demonic powers and each has their own personal demon consigliere appear to them if they continue to promote and cause enough blood sacrifice and human suffering.

This claim that Judaics had an ancestral right to Palestine due to their genetics was, of course, a monstrous lie.

We now know for certain the vast majority (over 90%) these persecuted Judaics that survived this WWII European persecution carried no ancient Hebrew blood at all and were Khazarians (sometimes called Ashkenazim) from the area that is now called the Ukraine.

Most of these World Zionists, aka the Rothschild Khazarian Mafia, carry no Hebrew Blood either and typically answer to the top Old Black European nobility Families.

These Old Black European families that started and run World Zionism carry inter-generational satanism and practice secret occult black magick, trauma-based mind-kontrol, and numerous secret black arts.

*

World Zionists used the RKM to hijack America in 1913.

The World Zionists used the RKM to infiltrate and hijack America in 1913 by bribing members of the US Congress and the President to pass the illegal, clearly unconstitutional Federal Reserve Act in 1913.

Once these RKM had gained control over the creation and distribution of US money with no oversight or auditing ever, they could issue and print all the money they wanted as unbacked debt-notes and buy up, bribe or human compromise almost every single member of Congress and even most presidents.

Those they couldn’t they isolated, drove out of the office or if they deemed necessary arranged for their murder.

What have been the results of the hijacking of America by the World Zionists (WZs) in 1913 by the illegal and unconstitutional passage of the RKM’s Federal Reserve Act?

America became another World Zionist occupied nation-state just like England, France, Post WWII Germany, and so many others.

Once the WZs had control over the US Congress then they began to use America as their military and economic enforcer all over the world for their corporate partners.

This was explicated by General Smedley Butler in his famous book, War is a Racket. General Butler was the most decorated US Marine ever and was awarded two Medals of Honor for bravery in combat.

The sad secret is that most of the world central banks have been controlled by the WZs through their action-agent Cutouts the Rothschild Khazarian Mafia (RKM). Any nation-state which tried to eject the RKM central banks or the US Petro Dollar becomes an immediate target for civil war, revolution or destruction by war using completely fabricated fake reasons.

This is done by deploying the Military enforcers which include the US Military, NATO members militaries and private mercenary armies like the CIA’s and many others including ISIS, Daesh, el Nusra, etc.

Israel become the WZ organized crime central.

Israel has become the world capital of the Rothschild Khazarian Mafia (RKM) only because it has been mandated by the World Zionists. This has transformed Israel into the world capital for sexual perversion, kidnapping for sex trafficking, murder for organ trafficking, and high-level financial crimes.

Recently the RKM has been ripping off their own fellow Israelis and many Israelis have had enough. Various Israel citizen groups are now working to get Netanyahu out of the office and to see that their laws for financial crimes are enforced.

There is a now a big split forming in Israeli politics. A significant number of Israelis are getting fed up with the corruption and with the persecution of Palestinians as well as and the continuing theft of more and more of their land.

Foreign based espionage groups in America have been deployed by the WZs.

All these foreign-based espionage groups in America that are now trying to create chaos like the ADL and SPLC are pretending to support minorities.  And they have been set up, funded and deployed by the WZs through Cutouts and Mind-kontrolled stooges.

They do this in order to create a cover for themselves because once the average American finds out what they are doing to undermine America, they will demand that they become registered as foreign agents and even prosecuted under existing espionage laws.

When these Khazarians pretend to care for (and represent minorities) and create false-narratives of bigotry, persecution and racism, this provides a great hiding place for these Khazarians.

*

Conclusion.

Most of the Judaics in America and Israel who call themselves “Jewish” are actually Khazarians and carry no Hebrew Blood at all. Therefore they are not real Semites compared to 80%+ of the Palestinians that do actually carry ancient Hebrew blood and are true Semites.

This hard reality means that these Khazarians pretending to be Hebrews can no longer legitimately plead Antisemitism when folks criticize them for their espionage against America.

The best antidote to the very crafty mind-kontrol of the World Zionists that is based on the lie that Khazarians are from ancient Hebrew blood is a frank declaration of the truth that 97.5% of Israelis who call themselves Jewish actually have no Hebrew blood at all.

Truth is the best immunization against the massive satanic two-faced lies of the WZs and their chief action agents the Rothschild Khazarian Mafia (RKM). And we now know that the RKM is the world’s largest organized crime syndicate because it is fully empowered by the World Zionist Banksters who are Babylonian Talmudics.

Israelis have been deeply mind-kontrolled by the World Zionists to believe a very big lie that they carry ancient Hebrew Blood and have an ancestral right to Palestine when they have none. They have been set up to create conflict in the Mideast to prime the war machine pump for vast RKM Bankster profits.

But insiders know that unless Israelis wake up and began to understand how the WZs have played them, they will eventually be over-run by the rest of the world, one way or another. Israelis have been highly rewarded with America taxpayer dollars by the WZs for doing their will, but they, in reality, are disposable Cutouts, just the way many of their relatives were who were kidnapped and placed in Nazi work camps upon the orders of the WZs who set up both Nazism and Communism in the first place.

Just for the records, I am not an Anti-Semite. I love the Palestinians people and other true Semites. Actually I am not even anti-Khazarian but I am against how they have been mind-kontrolled and used by World Zionists to serve as Cutouts and do their dirty work. I am not even anti-Jew, but I think they need to be exposed for being mind-kontrolled Khazarians.

Sadly most Jews do not even know that they are actually of Khazarian bloodlines which are a combination of Turk and Mongol whose true ancestors converted to Judaism in Khazaria under King Bulan.

As a tribe, those calling themselves Jews have been kicked out of over 100 nations for some of the unsocial acts of their leaders who were empowered by RKM Fiat central Banking and have now been exposed for being responsible for the attack on America on 9-11-01.

Thus many who have learned of how some top Khazarians willingly did the dirty work for the WZs, now have an intense dislike for “Jews” in general. The Jewish leaders (PNACers, top NeoCons, Israeli-America “Israeli-first” Dual Citizens) attempt to ward off this criticism and blame by claiming it is nothing but Antisemitism.

Actually, to be accurate, this anger and desire for justice to be leveled against the perps who did 9-11-01 could be called anti-Khazarianism and is well justified for all the illegal unconstitutional wars and associated mass-death, woundings, disabilities and mass-suffering it has brought about.

Its a fact that strong factions deep inside the Secret Shadow Government (SSG), the Secret Space War Program (SSWP), and the Pentagon now understand that it was the WZs, the Khazarian, the Dual Citizens and their lackeys who did 9-11-01.

This has produced a deep and growing split between true American Patriots and Khazarians in power and these Khazarians are being pushed aside and losing their power by the day.

The whole world is now organizing together to displace the World Zionists and their Khazarians Cutouts out of power.

It will take some time, but now that so many inside the SSG, the SSWP and the Pentagon know the truth that 9-11-01 was actually an attack on America by the World Zionists, they are beginning to take covert actions against the WZs and their Khazarian Cutouts and their lackeys.

Israelis need to wake up and learn the facts about their Khazarian blood heritage and the fact that the latest peer-reviewed Johns Hopkins genetic study shows that: about 97.5% have absolutely no ancient Hebrew blood at all, are not Semites, their Khazarian ancestors converted to a perverted form of Judaism under King Bulan in about 750 AD, and thus they have no ancient right to any of Palestinian land; while 80%+ of the Palestinians are true Semites because they carry ancient Hebrew Blood and these Semites do have an ancestral right to all of Palestine.

American Jews need to wake up soon too before they allow the WZ to destroy America, the goose that is laying their golden eggs of very high positions and high pay because they are part of the new synthetic tribe of  “Jews” and have been used by WZs as their disposal Cutouts. When the great Federal Reserve System reaches its limits like any Ponzi scheme always done (and this may be quite soon), the Cutouts will always receive the blame while the WZ occult masters slip away.

Every day, more and more Americans and folks around the world are learning that the WZs used Khazarians to run the attack on America on 9-11-01 to motivate Americans to deploy their soldiers as disposable cannon fodder for the WZ’s Mideast wars of aggression, acquisition, and profit. And that these wars have produced millions of dead, wounded, disabled and displaced civilians.

ISIS et all, the private Israeli/CIA/Saudi mercenary army, has now been defeated by the Syrian military and Russian precision air power.

It won’t be long now until most nations of the world, especially Mideast nations gang up, Lebanize and Balkanize Israel. At that point, it sure seems that the USA will be too weak economically to defend Israel for the WZs.

And as oil prices continue to fall, Saudi Arabia’s days serving as a primary war and terror financing tool for the WZs are now limited.

The promising news is that there is now a growing number of actual Torah Jews, True Hebrews, and even a growing number of Khazarians around the world that understand Zionism and all the evil it produces. These folks now want to give the Israeli settlements back to the Palestinians, establish Palestine as a nation and push the crazy Likudists out of power in Israel.

A surprising number of young college-aged Khazarians actually support the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement (BDS) against Israel.

Every day more and more folks understand the evil that these WZ Babylonian Talmudic Baal worshiping Satanist do and have been getting away with.

Full exposure of all the evil done by these Satan worshiping WZs is now a certainty and no longer just a wish, thanks to the Internet, the World’s New Gutenberg Press.

So when you hear the term “Jew” used, think Khazarian synthetic racial tribe that is actually comprised of Khazarian converts to Judaism. Think Turk and Mongol bloodlines and no direct ancestry to ancient Hebrews or Palestine. And remember that about 97.5% of these folks that call themselves Jewish carry no ancient Hebrew blood at all and are thus not Semites.

And do not fall for their artificially created defense of Antisemitism for any criticism since it only applies to true Semites and not them, folks like the Palestinians and small remnants of the original Twelve Hebrew Tribes which were scattered around the world after diaspora with most interbreeding with other bloodlines.

It is important for Khazarians to realize they have been mind-kontrolled by the WZs and many of their relatives suffered persecution in WWII at the direction of the WZs who made money off the work camps where their relatives manufactured war materials for the Nazis.

When Israel becomes blamed for 9-11-01 and the Khazarian staffed Federal Reserve System fails, Khazarians will likely be blamed and persecuted once again unless they wake up now. And as always, the WZs slip away and their highly paid Khazarian Cutouts get blamed.

*

If Even Ken Roth Can’t Criticize Israel, No One Can

The Palsbara Buster: Zionists and "Criticism" : IsraelPalestine

They work on each and every US  state

BRANKO MARCETIC

Ken Roth, the ex-head of Human Rights Watch, recently had his hiring at Harvard vetoed by administrators.

Because when it comes to criticism of Israeli apartheid, even a notorious friend of the powerful like Roth can’t get a pass from the establishment.

In American politics, elections come and go, but some things stay the same: criticizing Israel remains the ultimate taboo.

As yet further evidence, take what recently happened to former Human Rights Watch head Kenneth Roth.

After resigning from the organization last April, the Nation reported last week, Roth was offered a fellowship at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Someone with a nearly three-decade-long tenure leading a prestigious human rights organization joining an Ivy League human rights research center — what could possibly be controversial about that?

Israel labels Palestinian human rights groups as terrorist organizations

Israel, US vote against UN funds for ‘antisemitic’ Conference

Israel labels Amnesty International ‘anti-Semitic’ over ‘apartheid’ report

The fact that Roth and his organization had the temerity to treat Israel like every other repressive, rights-violating government they scrutinized, it turned out.

Roth was never explicitly told why, after a round of interviews and being sent a formal proposal to join, the Kennedy School’s dean Douglas Elmendorf decided not to approve his hiring, reportedly an unprecedented situation for the Carr Center.

But Elmendorf did tell Kathryn Sikkink, a high-profile human rights professor associated with the center, who relayed to the Nation on the record that Elmendorf claimed Human Rights Watch had an “anti-Israel bias” and that Roth’s tweets about the country’s conduct were a problem.

As the author of the Nation report, Michael Massing, points out, the charges defy credulity.

Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians is just one of the many, many instances of human rights abuses around the world that Human Rights Watch regularly documented under Roth, which included abuses by Palestinian groups.

And its characterization of Israel’s abuses has not been materially different from other vaunted human rights organizations like Amnesty International, whose alumni the Kennedy School has never had a problem hosting before.

As for Roth’s Twitter feed, it’s presumably his repeated references to Israeli apartheid that drew the ire of whoever intimidated Elmendorf into taking this step.

Yet Roth was, at different times, quoting everyone from the late archbishop Desmond Tutu to the UN special rapporteur for Palestinian human rights to Israel’s own former attorney general in using that word.

Is one of the leading academic human rights institutions seriously accusing the UN and a former Israeli official of being biased against Israel?

As Katie Halper pointed out last year, that Israel is an apartheid state on account of its treatment of the Palestinians is a view that has been expressed by Amnesty, Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, and prominent Israeli political leaders, including a former education minister, a former environment minister, and even two former prime ministers, to name a few.

Halper, by the way, was abruptly fired for daring to point this out.

Roth is just the latest to join the long list of people who have faced censure at the hands of prominent institutions for criticizing Israel.

In recent times that list has included, besides Halper, Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson, who was fired from the Guardian for an offhand joke critical of Israel, Marc Lamont Hill who was fired from CNN for uttering a slogan of Palestinian liberation, and a long list of academics like Steven Salaita who have had their careers ruined for criticizing Israel’s conduct.

What’s novel here are Roth’s impeccable establishment credentials. Roth was dubbed the “godfather” of the human rights movement in a praiseful New York Times tribute to his career last year, and he usually tends to voice conventional wisdom that fits comfortably within the narrow spectrum of Washington foreign policy establishment discourse.

He has expressed the view that “the biggest threat to human rights is China” and that “the US government remains the most powerful proponent of human rights.”

He’s backed everything from the coup in Bolivia to regime change in Libya while keeping mum about the US-backed Saudi war on Yemen, and he and Human Rights Watch have been repeatedly criticized for their closeness to the US political and corporate establishment, right down to a well-documented revolving door for alumni of the US state department and even CIA.

At one point, Roth signed an agreement with a Saudi real estate magnate agreeing to take his money as long as it wasn’t used for LGBTQ advocacy in the Middle East.

The point here isn’t to run down Roth. It is that, if someone with this record and connections can’t make reasonable, factually accurate criticisms of Israeli policy, then who can?

This isn’t so much a problem of a distorted political climate surrounding Israel as it is of power and money.

As Massing points out, it’s the Kennedy School’s own revolving door between government officials, like former CIA director Michael Morell and disgraced former Iraq and Afghanistan commander David Petraeus, and its reliance on funding from pro-Israel donors — including Les Wexner, the oddly generous friend and benefactor of late child-sex-trafficker-for-the-elite Jeffrey Epstein — that ultimately made Roth persona non grata at the Carr Center.

Predictably, the usual, cynical voices are already declaring this piece of reporting an antisemitic “conspiracy theory.”

It’s in the interests of even the most establishment-friendly liberals to push back on all of this, beyond the fact that such cynical abuse of that accusation empowers actual antisemites by cheapening it.

Such accusations against the Left have been intensely weaponized both in the United States and, to an even more extreme extent, across the pond in the UK, where they have been used to delegitimize and even purge the Left from political power, including Jewish activists.

Liberal voices were silent or even joined in on this shameful display.

But the Roth episode shows that it’s only a matter of time before that kind of thing creeps closer to the political center.

And when that happens, it undermines everyone’s ability to have a rational debate about foreign policy and human rights.

‘The Execution of the Palestinian People’

An exclusive Jewish right to settle and live in the land implicitly announces that the 6.5 million Palestinians who live on it may have no right to be there at all.

As part of his bargain with the fascist blocs of Religious Zionism and Jewish Power, according to the Israeli newspaper Arab 48, incoming Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke of an “exclusive Jewish right” to expand settlements inside Israel proper, in Galilee and the Negev, as well as to plant squatters in the Palestinian West Bank.

An exclusive Jewish right to settle and live in the land implicitly announces that the 6.5 million Palestinians who live on it are there by suffrage and maybe have no right to be there at all. That right is exclusively Jewish, Netanyahu says.

The Zionists say they are not colonizers. They say they are in their own homeland. But they behave as colonizers. They are foreign to Palestine or even  Israel at any point in time) took all what wasn’t theirs. Invented a people, an alien language (Hebrew)  for themselves.

Jordanian newspaper called this plank of his platform “the execution of the Palestinian people.”

According to the Associated Press, Netanyahu announced that he will legalize those Israeli squatter-settlements on Palestinian-owned land that even Israel had considered illegal.

He would vastly expand the number of Israeli squatters in the Palestinian West Bank. And ultimately, he pledged to annex the Palestinian West Bank entirely to Israel.

Since Netanyahu has no intention of ever granting Israeli citizenship to the 3 million Palestinians living under Israeli military rule, the formal annexation of their territory would cement Israel’s Apartheid system of racial difference.

According to Arab 48, the Adalah human rights organization denounced the platform as openly racist, discriminatory and Jewish supremacist, especially the language about exclusive Jewish rights to the land, which implies that Palestinian East Jerusalem will never be allowed to become the capital of a Palestinian state.

Adalah called on the world to take a stand against this flagrant Israeli Apartheid.

The outline of Netanyahu’s governmental program ominously said that preference would be given to former soldiers in the Israeli army for admission to university departments of medicine, law, computer science, accounting, and engineering.

Since the 21% of the population who are of Palestinian heritage are not permitted to serve in the military, this step would put them at a severe disadvantage in receiving admission to those departments.

Only the small community of Druze are an exception to the ban on military service.

hint: these are not Jewish implants. They are the Palestinians.

He wants to make reforms in the education system.

The mealy-mouthed contradictions are apparent in his pledge both to treat all communities equally and to use the education system to “strengthen Jewish identity.”

Likewise, he will safeguard the Jewish character of the state, but not upset the status quo among the various religions in Israel.

(Most of the 21% who are of Palestinian heritage are Muslim, but there is a vocal Christian minority that is increasingly upset about Jewish attacks on churches and attempts to take away church lands. 

Netanyahu’s new best friends on the fascist Right are for anything but treating non-Jews equally or maintaining the status quo regarding Muslim and Christian places of worship.

 

Stole everything from Palestine!

But of course Palestinian-Israelis are 21% of the population and sometimes they can have an impact on elections, so Netanyahu turned around and said in his platform that he would address issues in insecurity and crime in Palestinian-Israeli communities, and would invest in education and infrastructure for them.

Very magnanimous of him, since apparently they are excluded from the exclusively Jewish right to even be there.

His platform made a sinister call for a “rebalancing” of the powers of the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary, with the implication that the judiciary would be cut down to size.

Netanyahu is on trial for corruption before the courts. Netanyahu apparently wants to strike down the prerogative of judicial review of laws that appear to contradict organic laws that have a constitutional character.

In short, the supreme court could not overturn a law of the parliament or Knesset that its justices believe to be unconstitutional.

It is sort of as though Steve Bannon were elected president and started rejiggering the U.S. constitution and racial relations, only in Hebrew.

 

“Israel” Thrives on Palestinian Resources

In Response to answer #6

Historic Palestine has long had an abundance of natural resources, ranging from fresh and ground water, arable land and, more recently, oil and natural gas.

In the seven decades since the establishment of the state of Israel, these resources have been compromised and exploited through a variety of measures.

These include widespread Palestinian dispossession of land in the ongoing Nakba, exploitation of water through failed negotiations, and a finders-keepers approach to gas and oil found in or under occupied land.