Palestine: Actions by Israeli governments may amount to international crimes-Independent Commission
These Israelis in the audience are there to protest the topic of Palestine. Period. Something personal for me..Israelis look stupid, sound stupid and ask rhetorical questions to waste time and disrupt the meeting.
Speakers: Ms. Navanethem Pillay (Chair), along with members, Mr. Miloon Kothari and Mr. Chris Sidoti.
After presenting the report of the Independent Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem ad in Israel to the General Assembly today (27 Oct), the Chair of the Commission, Navanethem Pillay, told reporters in New York that “the policies and actions by Israeli governments may amount international crimes.”
Pillay, a former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said these crimes include “transferring, directly or indirectly, part of one’s own civilian population into the occupied territory, and the crime against humanity, of deportation and forcible transfer.”
She said, “some of Israel’s policies and actions in the West Bank are only cosmetically intended to address the so called security concerns, and that security is often used as a pretext by Israel to justify territorial expansion.”
Asked about statements made by Israel’s Ambassador Gilad Erdan, Pillay said, “I am not antisemitic, let me make that clear.
And then to add insult to injury, they said that the report is also antisemitic.
Now, there isn’t a word in this report that can even be interpreted as antisemitic.
So, of course, it’s not new to us that this is always raised as diversion.”
Asked about including apartheid into the scope of the Commission’s investigations, the Chair said, “in this report, we are focusing on the root cause as we see it, which is the occupation.
And of course, part of it is lies in the apartheid and discrimination.
We will be coming to that.
That’s the beauty of this open ended mandate.
It gives us a scope to go in depth on too many issues and apartheid would be one of them.”
Miloon Kothari, a member of the Commission of Inquiry, said, “there’s a number of immediate steps that could be taken,” but added that “in fact, in our report, we say clearly that there are no sign of the occupation, being, you know, either slowed down or reversed, if anything, Israel has taken the decision that it’s that’s how it’s going to be, it’s going to be permanent.”
Responding to a journalist, another member of the Commission, Chris Sidoti, said, “our report in June did refer to the Hamas rocket attacks.
Indiscriminate firing of rockets into civilian population areas is a war crime.
We said that.
And there is no doubt about that, as a fact.
The obligations under international humanitarian law and international human rights law, bind all those exercising some form of state authority in Israel, the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and Gaza, and we will deal with it.”
Earlier today, in her address to the General Assembly’s Third Committee, Pillay said, “after 55 years, Israel is treating the occupation as a permanent fixture, and has for all intents and purposes annexed part of the West Bank, while seeking to hide behind a fiction of temporariness.
This permanence and annexation, including the purported de jure annexation, of East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights have led this permission to conclude that Israel’s occupation is now unlawful.”
Before her interventions, Erdan gave a statement outside the Security Council referred to the Commission of Inquiry’s report as “a vicious compilation of lies, bashing the only liberal democracy in the Middle East” He said, “this time the UN and its bodies have hit a new low.
The Commission of Inquiry Report being presented is a one-sided, terror-whitewashing, and morally bankrupt document that does nothing, nothing remotely productive for the Palestinians or the region.
In fact, it only makes matters worse, he chose the terrorists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the true oppressors of the Palestinian people, that terror pays off.”
Erdan said, “the sole purpose of this report, its authors and the very commission itself is to demonize and delegitimize the one and only Jewish state. You know, there is a word for the racist hatred of Jews, antisemitism.”
Hamas conducted a large-scale rocket attack from southern Lebanon into Israel on April 6 possibly as part of the larger pattern of escalation between Iran and Israel occurring throughout 2023.
Palestine is an Arab country located in Asia on the eastern Mediterranean coast, which is known also as the Levant. It is bordered by Jordan to the east, Lebanon to the north, and the Red Sea and Sinai, Egypt to the south. In the west, the Mediterranean Sea acts as a bridge connecting Africa, Asia, and Europe.
APRIL 6, 2023
Hamas and other unidentified Palestinian militants launched at least 34 rockets into northern Israel, with four landing in Israeli territory and injuring at least three people.[1]
Israeli forces intercepted around 25 rockets, and several more fell short of the border. Hamas launched an additional two rockets into Israel several hours later.
Hamas spokesperson Hazem Qassem framed the attacks as retaliation for Israeli raids and mass arrests inside the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem on April 4-5.[2]
Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants launched as many as 15 rockets from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip on April 5 in response to the raids, as CTP previously reported.[3]
Lebanese Hezbollah (LH) likely had advance knowledge of the attacks and may have even greenlighted it.
Hamas Political Bureau Chairman Ismail Haniyeh traveled to Lebanon on April 5, as CTP previously reported, visiting Beirut and southern Lebanon.
[4] Haniyeh reportedly met with senior LH officials, such Hassan Nasrallah, and Hamas militants during the visits, possibly to discuss and prepare for the attacks.[5]
The fact that Hamas was able to conduct a second rocket attack several hours after the first one without LH intervening to prevent it further indicates that LH may have been complicit in the operation. Iranian leaders would have been presumably aware of the planned attacks as well if Hamas did, in fact, coordinate with Nasrallah.
Iran and LH may have encouraged or tacitly approved the rocket attacks in retaliation for a series of Israeli airstrikes in Syria in recent weeks.
Israel conducted airstrikes around Damascus on March 30, killing two IRGC officers.[6]
Iranian leaders have acknowledged that Israel killed these officers and have vowed publicly in recent days to retaliate, as CTP previously reported.[7]
Iranian leaders could portray the attacks as at least part of their retaliation regardless of whether they had any meaningful role in the planning and execution of the operation.
If Iran and LH were, in fact, involved in the attack, it signifies them expanding the geographic scope of their escalation pattern with Israel.
The ongoing cycle of violence between Tehran and Tel Aviv has occurred primarily in Syria throughout 2023 thus far.
Tehran may be expanding the geographic scope of the conflict to deter further Israeli action against Iranian interests in Syria.
Involving Lebanon and Palestine in the escalation cycle threatens Israel with spreading the conflict further to involve additional crises.
Conducting the rocket attacks from Lebanon has the added effect of raising the cost of certain Israeli responses given that retaliatory airstrikes into Lebanon would risk triggering an intensifying conflict with Lebanese Hezbollah and the Palestinian militant groups.
The family of Palestinian resistance icon Khader Adnan has denounced that Israeli authorities are refusing to hand over his body days after his death and will not say whether they intend to do so.
“It’s collective punishment,” Hassan Jabareen, the director of Palestinian human rights organization Adalah, told the New York Times (NYT). “These are bodies of people who live under Israeli occupation,” he added.
Adnan died on 2 May inside an Israeli prison after an 87-day hunger strike, the first such death in over 30 years.
A prominent member and spokesperson of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) resistance group, Adnan was being held without trial or charge.
Israel’s refusal to hand over Adnan’s body has drawn renewed attention to this practice, which is often used as leverage to obtain the bodies of Israelis held by Palestinian groups.
Tel Aviv has kept the bodies of about 130 Palestinians since 2015, some buried in cemeteries but most held in freezers, according to the Jerusalem legal center.
International human rights groups have denounced this practice by the occupation authorities, saying the withholding of bodies punishes the families of the dead collectively and could violate international law.
According to the NYT, Israel’s prison service said that it transferred the body to the military on Tuesday, the day of his death, but a military spokesman said on Wednesday that it was not in their possession, and as of Friday, the body’s location remained unknown.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) called on Israel this week to return the body “so his family can mourn and arrange a dignified burial according to their customs and beliefs.”
“We want the sheikh among us,” Adnan’s wife said, referring to a religious honorific given to her husband. “And we want him to be buried next to his father as he willed.”
Adnan was detained on 5 February and immediately went on hunger strike.
In the days before his death, he suffered from severe health problems, including frequent vomiting of blood, weakness, frequent loss of consciousness, difficulty speaking, and severe pain all over his body.
UN officials recently called for Israel to be held accountable for his death, calling it “a tragic testament to Israel’s cruel and inhumane detention policy and practices, as well as the international community’s failure to hold Israel accountable in the face of callous illegalities perpetrated against Palestinians.”
Israel currently holds approximately 4,900 Palestinians in its prisons, including 1,016 administrative detainees held indefinitely without trial or charge.
Administrative detention orders are reviewed every six months to see if a detainee may be released or if the order will be renewed. This process can go on for years or even decades.
“Speaker McCarthy wants to rewrite history but the apartheid state of Israel was born out of violence and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians,” Tlaib said Monday on Twitter.
“75 years later, the Nakba continues to this day.”
Tlaib’s tweet, which was in response to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s post noting the “special relationship” between Israel and the U.S., was the subject of an instant fact check by Twitter, with notes below the post pointing out several errors.
It’s not the holyland, it’s a filty Ashkanazi haven.
They did not make the desert “bloom”!
The fact check first points out that Israel was created by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, linking to the document at the U.N.’s official website.
The fact check then points out that the “ethnic cleansing” Tlaib claimed happened “affected both Jewish and Arab communities caught up in the war initiated by 5 Arab states who
To bolster the second point, the Twitter fact check linked to the State Department’s official history of the Arab-Israeli War of 1948.
The last note pointed out that Israel has over 20% Arab citizens who have “full and equal rights,” linking to a Democracy Institute study that found the country’s Arab residents had declining rates of infant mortality and rising life expectancies.
Twitter’s “Community Notes” system has been expanded by new platform owner Elon Musk, who announced last month that there would be “no exceptions” to fact checks for those who post “materially false statements on this platform.”
Musk pointed out that anyone could be fact checked under the system, including heads of states and even the billionaire owner himself.
Say hello to the ‘new Jews’
The fact check of Tlaib, a high-profile Democratic member of the progressive “Squad,” comes after conservatives have long argued social media companies unfairly target conservative views for arbitrary fact checks and bans, something that is evidently changing at Twitter under the leadership of Musk.
Tlaib’s tweet also received scorn from other users of the platform, including former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, who argued the Michigan Democrat was “a bit off” on the facts.
“You’re a bit off on this congresswoman,” Friedman said in a response on Twitter.
“Actually, the State of Israel was born notwithstanding the unsuccessful Palestinian attempts at ethnic cleansing to remove the Jews, through acts of terror and collaboration with Hitler (whose dear friend was Grand Mufti of Jerusalem).”
The tweet was also condemned by Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations Gilad Erdan, who told Fox News Digital the comments were an example of the Democrat’s “antisemitic lies.”
“Tlaib’s ignorance and hatred toward the Jewish people and the State of Israel know no bounds,” Erdan said.
“The facts are clear: the Arabs rejected the UN’s resolution to establish a Jewish state and started a war to annihilate the Jews in Israel.
“We wish to express our definite opposition to a Jewish state in any part of Palestine.” Rabbi Yosef Tzvi Dushinsky, Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem (1867-1948)
Since then, for the past 75 years, the Palestinians are bringing upon themselves a Nakba by continuing to incite hate and terrorism and rejecting every peace plan,” Erdan continued.
“Tlaib is rewriting history and her antisemitic lies ignore the fact that the only ethnic cleansing took place against the 850,000 Jews who were expelled from Arab countries following Israel’s establishment.”
To coerce the Jews to immigrate to Palestine, Zionist leaders followed Theodor Herzl’s recommendation where he stated: “It is essential that the sufferings of Jews become worse.
This will assist in realization of our plans.
I have an excellent idea … I shall induce anti-Semites to liquidate Jewish wealth … the anti-Semites will assist us thereby in that they will strengthen the persecution and oppression of Jews.
The (invention of) anti-Semites shall be our best friends.”
Zionist leaders launched a covert anti-Jewish and propaganda campaigns claiming that Jews were persecuted and massacred in Eastern Europe.
By the 19th century, those who wanted Jews to “return” to the Holy Land were more likely to be Christian Zionists than Jews.
Lord Shaftesbury, a compassionate Tory who contributed to improving the conditions of lunatics in asylums and children in factories (The Ten Hours Act, 1833), agitated endlessly for promoting a Jewish presence in Palestine.
Sand describes him as an Anglican Theodor Herzl before Herzl; and with reason, since Shaftesbury appears to have even coined the famous line: “A country without a nation for a nation without a country.”
He hoped, of course, the Jews would also convert to Christianity. Lord Palmerston, on the Liberal side, warmed to the idea, not because he cared in the slightest about Jews (or Christians), but because he thought that British Jews colonising a part of the Ottoman Empire would increase British influence.
At the time, few Jews were Zionists.
When persecuted, as they were in the tsarist empire, they much preferred to flee to the new lands of immigration such as Argentina and the United States, than to the Promised Land.
What made the “State of Israel” possible was not God’s promise of a return to a long-lost land, but the Holocaust and the western reluctance to provide a refuge for its survivors.
This is how they made the “desert bloom.”
Holocaust is the Zionist MO. It follows them everywhere.
Much of what Shlomo Sand reveals is known to specialists.
His achievement consists in debunking a nationalist mythology which holds sway in large sections of popular opinion.
It also normalizes Jews, since it challenges the belief in exceptionalism.
The Holocaust was a unique event, but the basic nationalist litany is similar across nations – almost a literary genre in itself – for it is poised between a lachrymose sense of self-pitying victimhood and a vainglorious account of heroic deeds.
“We”, so goes the story, have been around for centuries (1066, famously, in Britain; 966 in Poland; since antiquity in Italy and in Greece).
Eventually, after centuries, we achieved our freedom, our independence, our happiness, and we, who are unlike everyone else, can finally be like everyone else: members and possessors of a country and a nation.
Demystifying what the French call le roman national seems to be today one of the major tasks of historians (once they used to write it).
This can be an uphill struggle, yet it is to the credit of the Israeli book-reading public that Sand’s previous book, The Invention of the Jewish People became a bestseller. Truth-telling may be painful but necessary.
THANKS TO THE ONGOING conflict in Ukraine, we indeed seem to be rushing headlong into a major war—possibly a World War Three, possibly the world’s first (and perhaps last) nuclear war.
Ukraine leadership and their Western backers seem hell-bent on fighting to the last man, and Vladimir Putin, as an old-school Cold Warrior, seems equally determined to press ahead until achieving “victory.”
The cause seems hopeless for Ukraine, who cannot reasonably expect to prevail in an extended conflict with one of the largest militaries on Earth.
At best, they may bleed Russia over a period of months or years, but only at the cost of massive blood-letting themselves.
It seems that Ukraine will be the loser in this struggle, no matter what comes.
In the Western media, we are presented with a remarkably simplified storyline: Putin is an evil warmonger who simply wants to extend Russian territory; to this end, he is exploiting events in Ukraine, deploying his military ostensibly to support the Russian-speaking districts of Luhansk and Donetsk in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine.
But this is just cover, they say, for his mad quest to rebuild the Russian empire.
In pursuit of his goal, he is willing to inflict any amount of material damage and kill any number of civilians.
Fortunately, say our media, Putin has thus far been largely contained; the brave Ukrainian fighters are constantly “reclaiming” land, Russia’s advance has “stalled,” and indeed, Russia seems to be in danger of losing.
Consequently, the US and its allies must do all they can to “aid” and “support” the brave Ukrainians and their beleaguered but heroic leader, Volodymyr Zelensky.
No amount of money, no assortment of deadly weaponry, no military intelligence, is too much.
Like World War Two, this “war” is an unconditional struggle of Good versus Evil; therefore the West, as the moral paragon of the world, must step up, undergo sacrifice, and ensure that Good prevails.
And indeed, the financial support from just the United States is breathtaking: As of early May, Congress has approved $13.6 billion in aid, much of it for direct Ukrainian military support.
And yet this would only cover costs through September.
Thus, president Biden recently called for an additional package of $33 billion, which would include over $20 billion in military and security aid, and, surprisingly, $2.6 billion for “the deployment of American troops to the region,” in order to “safeguard NATO allies.”
Incredibly, Congress responded by approving $40 billion, bringing the total aid thus far to $54 billion.
For perspective, this represents over 80% of Russia’s annual defense budget of $66 billion.
(By contrast, America allocates well over $1 trillion—that is, $1,000 billion—annually in direct and indirect military expenditures.)
Notably, such unconditional support and defense of Ukraine is a virtually unanimous view across the American political spectrum, and throughout Europe.
Right and left, conservative and liberal, working class or wealthy elite, all sectors of society are apparently united in opposition to the evil Putin.
In an era when virtually no issue garners unanimous support, the Ukrainian cause stands out as an extremely rare instance of bipartisan, multi-sector agreement.
The rare dissenters—such as Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and a handful of alt-right renegades—are routinely attacked as “Russian assets” or “tools of Putin.”
There is no room for disagreement, no space for debate, no opposing views allowed.
In fact, though, this is yet another case of what I might call the “unanimity curse”: when all parties in American society are united on a topic, any topic, then we really need to worry.
Here, it seems that the reality is of a potent Jewish Lobby, exerting itself (again) in the direction of war, for reasons of profit and revenge against a hated enemy.
There is, indeed, a Jewish hand at work here, one that may well drive us into another world war, and even a nuclear war—one which, in the worst case, could mean the literal end of much of life on this planet.
The unanimity comes when all parties are subject, in various ways, to the demands of the Lobby, and when the public has been misled and even brainwashed by a coordinated Jewish media into believing the standard narrative.
The best cure for this catastrophic situation is unrestricted free speech.
The Lobby knows this, however, and thus takes all possible measures to inhibit free speech.
Normally, such a struggle ebbs and flows according to the issue and the times; but now, the situation is dire.
Now more than ever, a lack of free speech could be fatal to civilized society.
Context and Run-Up
To fully understand the Jewish hand in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, we need to review some relevant history.
Over the centuries, there have been constant battles over the lands of present-day Ukraine, with Poles, Austro-Hungarians, and Russians alternately dominating.
Russia took control of most of Ukraine in the late 1700s and held it more or less continuously until the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991; this is why Putin claims that the country is “part of Russia.”
For their part, Jews have experienced a particularly tumultuous relationship with Russia, one that ranged from disgust and detestation to a burning hatred.
As it happened, Jews migrated to Russia in the 19th century, eventually numbering around 5 million.
They were a disruptive and agitating force within the nation and thus earned the dislike of Czars Nicholas I (reign 1825 to 1855), Alexander II (1855 to 1881, when he was assassinated by a partly-Jewish anarchist gang), and especially Nicholas II (1894 to 1917)—the latter of whom was famously murdered, along with his family, by a gang of Jewish Bolshevists in 1918.
Already in 1871, Russian activist Mikhail Bakunin could refer to the Russian Jews as “a single exploiting sect, a sort of bloodsucker people, a collective parasite”.[1]
The assassination of Alexander initiated a series of pogroms that lasted decades, and which set the stage for a lingering Jewish hatred of all things Russian.[2]
For present purposes, though, we can jump to the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election (I note that Ukraine also has a prime minister, but unlike most European countries, he typically has limited powers).
In 2004, it came down to “the two Viktors”: the pro-Western V. Yushchenko and the pro-Russian V. Yanukovych.
The first round was nearly tied, and thus they went to a second round in which Yanukovych prevailed by around three percentage points.
But amid claims of vote-rigging, Western Ukrainians initiated an “Orange Revolution”—backed by the Ukrainian Supreme Court—that annulled those results and mandated a repeat runoff election.
The second time, the tables were turned, and the pro-West Yushchenko won by eight points.
The West was elated, and Putin naturally mad as hell.
The following years witnessed financial turmoil and, unsurprisingly, constant harassment from Russia.
By 2010, Ukrainians were ready for a change, and this time Yanukovych won handily, over a Jewish female competitor, Yulia Timoshenko—notably, she had “co-led the Orange Revolution.” Russia, for once, was satisfied with the result.
But of course, in the West, Europe and the US were mightily displeased, and they soon began efforts to reverse things yet again.
Among other strategies, they apparently decided to deploy the latest in high tech and social media.
Thus in June 2011, two of Google’s top executives—Eric Schmidt and a 30-year-old Jewish upstart named Jared Cohen—went to visit Julian Assange in the UK, then living under house arrest.
It is well-known, incidentally, that Google is a Jewish enterprise, with Jewish founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page running the ship.[3]
The nominal purpose of the trip was to conduct research for a book that Schmidt and Cohen were working on, regarding the intersection of political action and technology—in plain words, how to foment revolutions and steer events in a desired direction.
As Assange relates in his 2014 book When Google Met Wikileaks, he was initially unaware of the deeper intentions and motives of his interviewers.
Only later did he come to learn that Schmidt had close ties to the Obama administration, and that Cohen was actively working on political upheaval.
As Assange wrote, “Jared Cohen could be wryly named Google’s ‘director of regime change’.” Their immediate targets were Yanukovych in Ukraine and Assad in Syria.
By early 2013, the American Embassy in Kiev was training right-wing Ukrainian nationalists on how to conduct a targeted revolt against Yanukovych.
It would not be long until they had their chance.
In late 2013, Yanukovych decided to reject an EU-sponsored IMF loan, with all the usual nasty strings attached, in favor of a comparable no-strings loan from Russia.
This apparent shift away from Europe and toward Russia was the nominal trigger for the start of protest actions.
Thus began the “Maidan Uprising,” led in large part by two extreme nationalist groups: Svoboda and Right Sector.[4] Protests went on for nearly three months, gradually accelerating in intensity; in a notable riot near the end, some 100 protestors and 13 police were shot dead.
As the Uprising reached its peak, at least one American Jew was highly interested: Victoria Nuland.
As Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State (first under Hillary Clinton, and then under the half-Jew John Kerry), Nuland had direct oversight of events in eastern Europe.[5]
And for her, it was personal; her father, Sherwin Nuland (born Shepsel Nudelman), was a Ukrainian Jew.
She was anxious to drive the pro-Russian Yanukovych out of power and replace him with a West-friendly, Jew-friendly substitute.
And she had someone specific in mind: Arseniy Yatsenyuk. On 27 January 2014, as the riots were peaking, Nuland called American Ambassador to Ukraine, Jeff Pyatt, to urgently discuss the matter.
Nuland pulled no punches: “Yats” was her man. We know this because the call was apparently tapped and the dialogue later posted on Youtube. Here is a short excerpt:
Nuland: I think Yats is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience. He’s the… what he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside. He needs to be talking to them four times a week, you know. I just think Klitsch going in… he’s going to be at that level working for Yatseniuk, it’s just not going to work.
Pyatt: Yeah, no, I think that’s right. OK. Good. Do you want us to set up a call with him as the next step? […]
Nuland: OK, good. I’m happy. Why don’t you reach out to him and see if he wants to talk before or after.
Pyatt: OK, will do. Thanks.
It was clear to both of them, though, that the EU leadership had other ideas.
The EU was much more anxious to be a neutral party and to avoid direct intervention in Ukrainian affairs so as to not unduly antagonize Russia.
But in time-tested Jewish fashion, Nuland did not give a damn.
A bit later in the same phone call, she uttered her now-famous phrase: “F___ the EU.” So much for Jewish subtlety.[6]
But there was another angle that nearly all Western media avoided: “Yats” was also Jewish.
In a rare mention, we read in a 2014 Guardian story that “Yatsenyuk has held several high-profile positions including head of the country’s central bank, the National Bank of Ukraine…
He has played down his Jewish-Ukrainian origins, possibly because of the prevalence of antisemitism in his party’s western Ukraine heartland.”
For some reason, such facts are never relevant to Western media.
As the Maidan Uprising gave way to the Maidan Revolution in February 2014, Yanukovych was forced out of office, fleeing to Russia.
Pro-Western forces then succeeded in nominating “Yats” as prime minister, effective immediately, working in conjunction with president Oleksandr Turchynov.
This provisional leadership was formalized in a snap election in May 2014 in which the pro-Western candidate Peter Poroshenko won.
(The second-place finisher was none other than Yulia Timoshenko—the same Jewess who had lost to Yanukovych in 2010.)
It was under such circumstances that Putin invaded and annexed Crimea, in February 2014.
It was also at this time that Russian separatists in Donbass launched their counter-revolution, initiating a virtual civil war in Ukraine; to date, eight years later, around 15,000 people have died in total, many civilians.
With this American-sponsored coup finished, Ukrainian Jews began to reach out to the West to increase their influence.
Thus it happened that just a few months after Maidan, the wayward son of the American vice president got in touch with a leading Ukrainian Jew, Mykola Zlochevsky, who ran a large gas company called Burisma.
In this way, Hunter Biden incredibly found himself on the board of a corporation of which he knew nothing, in an industry of which he knew nothing, and which nonetheless was able to “pay” him upwards of $500,000 per year—obviously, for access to father Joe and thus to President Obama.
Hunter carried on in this prestigious role for around five years, resigning only in 2019, as his father began his fateful run for the presidency.[7]
Despite a rocky tenure, Yatsenyuk managed to hold his PM position for over two years, eventually resigning in April 2016.
His replacement was yet another Jew, Volodymyr Groysman, who served until August 2019. The Jewish hand would not be stayed. All this set the stage for the rise of the ultimate Jewish player, Volodymyr Zelensky.
This situation is particularly remarkable given that Jews are a small minority in Ukraine.
Estimates vary widely, but the Jewish population is claimed to range from a maximum of 400,000 to as low as just 50,000.
With a total population of 41 million, Jews represent, at most, 1% of the nation, and could be as small as 0.12%.
Under normal conditions, a tiny minority like this should be almost invisible; but here, they dominate.
Such is the Jewish hand.
Enter the Jewish Oligarchs
In Ukraine, there is a “second government” that calls many of the shots.
This shadow government is an oligarchy: a system of rule by the richest men.
Of the five richest Ukrainian billionaires, four are Jews: Igor (or Ihor) Kolomoysky, Viktor Pinchuk, Rinat Akhmetov, and Gennadiy Bogolyubov.
Right behind them, in the multi-millionaire class, are Jews like Oleksandr Feldman and Hennadiy Korban.
Collectively, this group is often more effective at imposing their will than any legislator.
And unsurprisingly, this group has been constantly enmeshed in corruption and legal scandals, implicated in such crimes as kidnapping, arson and murder.[8]
Of special interest is the first named above. Kolomoysky has long been active in banking, airlines and media—and in guiding minor celebrities to political stardom.
In 2005 he became the leading shareholder of the 1+1 Media Group, which owns seven TV channels, including the highly popular 1+1 channel.
(The 1+1 Group was founded in 1995 by another Ukrainian Jew, Alexander Rodnyansky.)
Worth up to $6 billion in the past decade, Kolomoysky’s current net wealth is estimated to be around $1 billion.
Not long after acquiring 1+1, Kolomoysky latched on to an up-and-coming Jewish comedian by the name of Volodymyr Zelensky.
Zelensky had been in media his entire adult life, and even co-founded a media group, Kvartal 95, in 2003, at the age of just 25.
Starring in feature films, he switched to television by the early 2010s, eventually coming to star in the 1+1 hit show “Servant of the People,” where he played a teacher pretending to be president of Ukraine.
Then there was the notable 2016 comedy skit in which Zelensky and friends play a piano with their penises—in other words, typical low-brow scatological Jewish humor, compliments of Zelensky and Kolomoysky.
[Zelensky also appeared in a trashy “music” video in which he simulates a grotesque homosexual “come on.” — Ed.]
By early 2018, the pair were ready to move into politics.
Zelensky registered his new political party for the upcoming 2019 election, and declared himself a presidential candidate in December 2018, just four months prior to the election.
In the end, of course, he won, with 30% of the vote in the first round, and then defeating incumbent Poroshenko in the 2nd round by a huge 50-point margin.
Relentless favorable publicity by 1+1 was credited with making a real difference.
Notably, the third-place finisher in that election was, yet again, the Jewess Yulia Timoshenko—like a bad penny, she just keeps coming back.[9]
Zelensky, incidentally, has dramatically profited from his “meteoric rise” to fame and power.
His Kvartal 95 media company earned him some $7 million per year.
He also owns a 25% share of Maltex Multicapital, a shell company based in the British Virgin Islands, as part of a “web of off-shore companies” he helped to establish back in 2012.
A Ukrainian opposition politician, Ilya Kiva, suggested recently that Zelensky is currently tapping into “hundreds of millions” in funding that flows into the country, and that Zelensky himself is personally earning “about $100 million per month.”
A Netherlands party, Forum for Democracy, recently cited estimates of Zelensky’s fortune at an astounding $850 million.
Apparently the “Churchill of Ukraine” is doing quite well for himself, even as his country burns.
In any case, it is clear that Zelensky owes much to his mentor and sponsor, Kolomoysky.
The latter even admitted as much back in late 2019, in an interview for the New York Times.
“If I put on glasses and look back at myself,” he said, “I see myself as a monster, as a puppet master, as the master of Zelensky, someone making apocalyptic plans.
I can start making this real” (Nov 13). Indeed—the Kolomoysky/Zelensky apocalypse is nearly upon us.
Between rule by Jewish oligarchs and manipulations by the global Jewish lobby, modern-day Ukraine is a mess of a nation—and it was so long before the current “war.”
Corruption there is endemic; in 2015, the Guardianheadlined a story on Ukraine, calling it “the most corrupt nation in Europe.”
An international corruption-ranking agency had recently assessed that country at 142nd in the world, worse than Nigeria and equal to Uganda.
As a result, Ukraine’s economy has suffered horribly.
Before the current conflict, their per-capita income level of $8700 put them 112th in the world, below Albania ($12,900), Jamaica ($9100), and Armenia ($9700); this is by far the poorest in Europe, and well below that of Russia ($25,700 per person).
Impoverished, corrupt, manipulated by Jews, now in a hot war—pity the poor Ukrainians.
Hail the American Empire
Enough history and context; let’s cut to the chase.
From a clear-eyed perspective, it is obvious why Zelensky and friends want to prolong a war that they have no hope of winning: They are profiting immensely from it.
As an added benefit, the actor Zelensky gets to perform on the world stage, which he will surely convert into more dollars down the road.
Every month that the conflict continues, billions of dollars are flowing into Ukraine, and Zelensky et al. are assuredly skimming their “fair share” off the top.
Seriously—who, making anywhere near $100 million per month, wouldn’t do everything conceivable to keep the gravy train running?
The fact that thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are dying has no bearing at all in Zelensky’s calculus; in typical Jewish fashion, he cares not one iota for the well-being of the White Europeans.
If his soldiers die even as they kill a few hated Russians, so much the better. For Ukrainian Jews, it is a win-win proposition.
Why does no one question this matter?
Why is Zelensky’s corruption never challenged?
Why are these facts so hard to find?
We know the answer: It is because Zelensky is a Jew, and Jews are virtually never questioned and never challenged by leading Americans or Europeans.
Jews get a pass on everything (unless they are obviously guilty of something heinous—and sometimes even then!).
Jews get a pass from fellow Jews because they cover for each other.
Jews get a pass from media because the media is owned and operated by Jews.
And Jews get a pass from prominent non-Jews who are in the pay of Jewish sponsors and financiers.
Zelensky can be as corrupt as hell, funneling millions into off-shore accounts, but as long as he plays his proper role, no one will say anything.
So the “war” goes on, and Zelensky and friends get rich.
What does Europe get from all this?
Nothing.
Or rather, worse than nothing: They get a hot war in their immediate neighborhood, and they get an indignant Putin threatening to put hypersonic missiles in their capital cities in less than 200 seconds.
They get to deal with the not-so-remote threat of nuclear war.
They get to see their currency decline—by 10% versus the yuan in a year and by 12% versus the dollar.
They get a large chunk of their gas, oil, and electricity supplies diverted or shut off, driving up energy prices.
And they get to see their Covid-fragile economies put on thin ice.
But perhaps they deserve all this.
As is widely known, the European states are American vassals, which means they are Jewish vassals.
European leaders are spineless and pathetic lackeys of the Jewish Lobby.
Judenknecht like Macron, Merkel, and now Scholz, are sorry examples of humanity; they have sold out their own people to placate their overlords.
And the European public is too bamboozled and too timid to make a change; France just had a chance to elect Le Pen, but the people failed to muster the necessary will.
Thus, Europe deserves its fate: hot war, nuclear threat, cultural and economic decline, sub-Saharan and Islamic immigrants—the whole package.
If it gets bad enough, maybe enough Europeans will awaken to the Jewish danger and take action. Or so we can hope.
What about the US? We could scarcely be happier.
Dead Russians, the hated Putin in a tizzy, and the chance to play “world savior” once again.
American military suppliers are ecstatic; they don’t care that most of their weapons bound for Ukraine get lost, stolen or blown up, and that (according to some estimates) only 5% make it to the front.
For them, every item shipped is another profitable sale, whether it is used or not.
And American congressmen get to pontificate about another “good war” even as they approve billions in aid.
And perhaps best of all, we get to press for an expansion to that American Empire known as NATO.
We need to be very clear here: NATO is simply another name for the American Empire.
The two terms are interchangeable.
In no sense is NATO an “alliance among equals.”
Luxembourg, Slovakia, and Albania have absolutely nothing to offer to the US.
Do we care if they will “come to our aid” in case of a conflict?
That is a bad joke, at best.
In reality, what such nations are is more land, more people, and more economic wealth under the American thumb.
They are yet more places to station troops, build military outposts, and run “black sites.”
NATO always was, and always will be, the American Empire.
The push for Ukraine to join NATO by the West-friendly Zelensky was yet another blatant attempt at a power grab by the US, this one on Russia’s doorstep.
Putin, naturally, took action to circumvent that.
But of course, now the push moves to Sweden and Finland, both of whom are unwisely pursuing NATO membership in the illusory quest for security, when in reality they will simply be selling what remains of their national souls to the ruthless Judeo-American masters.
For their sake, I hope they are able to avoid such a future.
And all the while, American Jews and a Jewish-American media play up the “good war” theme, send more weapons, and press ever further into the danger zone.
Ukrainian-American Jews like Chuck Schumer are right out front, calling for aid, for war, for death.[10]
“Ukraine needs all the help it can get and, at the same time, we need all the assets we can put together to give Ukraine the aid it needs,” said Schumer recently, eager to approve the next $40 billion aid package.
As Jews have realized for centuries, wars are wonderful occasions for killing enemies and making a fast buck.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that the present proxy war against Jewish enemies in eastern Europe began not long after the 20-year war against Jewish enemies in Afghanistan ended.
Life without war is just too damn boring, for some.
Public Outrage?
If more than a minuscule fraction of the public knew about such details, they would presumably be outraged.
But as I mentioned, the Jewish-controlled Western media does an excellent job in restricting access to such information, and in diverting attention whenever such ugly facts pop up.
The major exception is Tucker Carlson, who is able to reach some 3 million people each night; this is by far the widest reach for anything like the above analysis.
But Carlson falls woefully short—pathetically short—in defining the Jewish culprit behind all these factors.
Jews are never outed and never named by Carlson, let alone ever targeted for blame.
This crucial aspect is thus left to a literal handful of alt-right and dissident-right websites that collectively reach a few thousand people, at best.
And even if, by some miracle, all 3 million Tucker viewers were enlightened to the Jewish danger here, this still leaves some 200 million American adults ignorant and unaware.
The mass of people believe what they see on the evening news, or in their Facebook feeds, or Google news, or on CNN or MSNBC, or in the New York Times—all Jewish enterprises, incidentally.
This is why, when polled, 70% of the American public say that current aid to Ukraine is either “about right” or even “too little.”
This, despite the fact that around 50% claim to be “very concerned” about nuclear war; clearly they are unable to make the necessary connections.
And for many, it is even worse than this: around 21% would support “direct American military intervention” against Russia, which means an explicit World War Three, with all the catastrophic outcomes that this entails.
Our Jewish media have done another fine job in whipping up public incitement.
In sum, we can say that our media have cleverly constructed a “philo-Semitic trap”: Any mention or criticism of the Jewish hand in the present conflict is, first, highly censored, and then, if necessary, is dismissed as irrational anti-Semitism.
Sympathy toward the (truly) poor, suffering Ukrainians is played up to the hilt, and Putin and the Russians relentlessly demonized.
Leading American Jews, like Tony Blinken and Chuck Schumer, are constantly playing the good guys, pleading for aid, promising to help the beleaguered and outmanned Ukrainian warriors.
Who can resist this storyline?
Thus, we have no opposition, no questioning, no deeper inquiries into root causes.
Jews profit and flourish, Ukrainians and Russians suffer and die, and the world rolls along toward potential Armageddon.
The reality is vastly different.
Global Jews are, indeed, “planetary master criminals,” as Martin Heidegger long ago realized.[11]
They function today as they have for centuries: as advocates for abuse, exploitation, criminality, death and profits.
This is self-evidently true: If the potent Jewish Lobby wanted true peace, or flourishing humanity, they would be actively pushing for such things and likely succeeding.
Instead, we have endless mayhem, war, terrorism, social upheaval and death, even as Jewish pockets get ever-deeper.
And the one possible remedy for all this—true freedom of speech—recedes from our grasp.
On the one hand, I fear greatly for our future.
On the other, I feel that we get what we deserve.
When we allow malicious Jews to dominate our nations, and then they lead us into war and global catastrophe, well, what can we say?
Perhaps there is no other way than to await the inevitable conflagration, exact retribution in the ensuing chaos, and then rebuild society from scratch—older and wiser.
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
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:
to attain a Jewish majority in Palestine;
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:
The movement was seen not only as inherently righteous, but also as meeting an overwhelming need among European Jews.
European culture was superior to indigenous Arab culture; the Zionists could help civilize the East.
External support was needed from a major power; relations with the Arab world were a secondary matter.
Arab nationalism was a legitimate political movement, but Palestinian nationalism was either illegitimate or nonexistent.
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:
They built political structures that could assume state functions
Created a military force.
Promoted large-scale immigration.
Acquired land as the inalienable property of the Jewish people
Established and monopolistic concessions. The labor federation, Histadrut, tried to force Jewish enterprises to hire only Jewish labor
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.
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:
The economic suitability of the tract
Its contribution to forming a solid block of Jewish territory.
The prevention of isolation of settlements
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
(CHICAGO) — Israel wants it all. For decades, it’s been systematically stealing Palestinian land and resources.
Al Haq’s new report provides more evidence.
Titled, “Pillage of the Dead Sea: Israel’s Unlawful Exploitation of Natural Resources in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” it details grand theft and war crimes.
They benefit Jews by harming Palestinians. More on it below.
Yesh Din defends Palestinian human rights. It exposes Israeli abuses. It champions long denied accountability.
In March 2009, it petitioned Israel’s High Court of Justice (HCJ).
It wants lawless West Bank mining operations stopped. Israel and 11 Israeli corporations steal Palestinian resources rightfully theirs.
It demanded all quarrying and mining activities cease.
It argued that Israeli companies pillage Palestinian resources for profit and Israel’s benefit.
Doing so also violates fundamental international law. As an occupying power, Israel is obligated to protect, not exploit, Palestinian rights.
On Dec. 26, 2011, the HCJ rejected Yesh Din’s petition. It sanctioned lawless pillage. On Jan. 10, 2012, Yesh Din requested another hearing before a broader panel of judges.
Seven distinguished Israeli legal experts stood with Yesh Din.
They took issue with the Court’s ruling.
Their collective opinion matters.
It provides greater impact.
On July 25, 2012, the HCJ spurned Yesh Din again.
In his decision, retired Deputy President Judge Eliezer Rivlin said the December 2011 ruling rejected Yesh Din’s petition mainly because Israel and the Palestinian Authority addressed the issue earlier. They agreed to an interim 1995 deal.
He failed to explain its terms.
It explicitly said “quarries must be transferred to the Palestinian side within 18 months.” Israel still controls them.
The Court’s ruling OK’d its right to steal.
THE COURT’S JUDGEMENT
Seven leading international law experts disagree.
They unequivocally call Israel’s mining operations lawless.
In their judgment, the Court’s ruling was troublesome.
Judge Rivlin addressed their opinion, saying, “I did not ignore the opinion of the experts on international law submitted in support of the petitioner’s argument.
The learned opinion raises important questions and analyzes them most skillfully and eruditely.”
“However, in the concrete circumstances of this case, since no precedent was set in the decision that would justify a further hearing, there is no need to discuss them at this stage.”
In response, Yesh Din attorney Shlomy Zachary said, “This decision by the High Court of Justice recognizes the serious flaws of the court’s decision on the original petition, and mutes its conclusions.”
“The court is also aware that the decision’s determinations must be decided in the future, and therefore the decision on the concrete matter cannot serve as a binding precedent.”
“The opinion of the leading experts from Israel’s universities, submitted as part of this case, added another level that reinforced the need to minimize the determinations about this matter, and we welcome that.”
Israel’s High Court tried having it both ways. In initially rejecting Yesh Din’s petition, HCJ President Dorit Beinisch said, “The belligerent occupation of Israel in the area has some unique characteristics, primarily the duration of the occupation period that requires the adjustment of the law to the reality on the ground, which imposes a duty upon Israel to ensure normal life for a period, which … is certainly long-term.”
At the same time, the Court spurned international law. It also dismissed the opinion of seven distinguished Israeli legal experts.
Their judgment is indisputable. Rule of law principles back it. It carries weight. It concluded saying “the license granted to Israeli corporations to mine exhaustible natural minerals in territory under belligerent occupation is illegal.”
High Court judges know it but ignored them and fundamental international law anyway.
Their ruling was not only dishonest, it was convoluted.
HOW THE DECISION AFFECTS THE PEOPLE
Outrageously, the Court said militarized occupation and Israeli Civil Administration operations benefit Palestinians.
In other words, controlling them at the point of a gun and pillaging their resources helps.
How, the Court didn’t explain. It merely said, “Royalties paid to the Civil Administration by the operators of the quarries are used to finance the operations of the military administration, which promotes various kinds of projects aimed to benefit the interests of the area.”
Stealing what’s theirs doesn’t help. Military occupation spurns their rights. Employment for small numbers of Palestinians at slave wages neither benefits them or the collective population.
Virtually all resources mined help Israel and its settlements. Mining fees, levies and royalties flow straight to Israeli state coffers. Palestinians are denied what’s rightfully theirs.
Al Haq’s report offers more proof. Black’s Law Dictionary calls pillage “the forcible taking of private property by an invading or conquering army from the enemy’s subjects.”
The 1907 Hague Regulations, Fourth Geneva and other international laws prohibit doing so under all circumstances.
The Statute of International Criminal Court calls “pillaging a town or place, even when taken by assault,” a war crime.
Various military manuals prohibit pillage/plunder. The U.N. and other international organizations condemn it.
Looting is absolutely forbidden.
It’s punishable under international, military and general statute laws.
RESOURCES BEING TAKEN
Israel spurns rule of law principles in all forms. Al Haq calls exploiting West Bank resources “the war crime of pillage.” Its report examines Israeli Dead Sea area operations.
It’s “prohibited from exploiting them in a way that undermines their capital and results in economic benefits for Israeli citizens, including settlers or for its national economy.”
The Dead Sea borders Jordan and Israel to the east and the West Bank to the west. It’s in the Jordan Rift Valley. It lies over 400 meters below sea level.
It’s 67 km long, 377 meters deep and 18 km across at its widest point. With 33.7 percent salinity, it’s one of the world’s saltiest water bodies.
In 1967, Israel seized control. Jordan previously controlled the area.
Oslo granted Israel military and administrative control. Vast land areas became closed military zones. Palestinians are denied entry to land rightfully theirs.
Since 1967, pillage accompanied occupation.
Palestinians were dispossessed from their own land and resources.
Israel stole and exploited the Dead Sea and surrounding areas by declaring them “State land.”
No legal basis whatever permits doing so.
Numerous military orders violate international law.
It’s been twisted, inverted, manipulated, distorted, undermined and spurned to justify the unjustifiable.
Israel invents its own version of reality.
Orwellian doublespeak defines it.
Fundamental occupying power obligations are violated. State authorities and settlers reap benefits.
THE DEAD SEA
At the same time, unsustainable water extraction and mining methods let water levels decrease significantly.
Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories was licensed to steal. It mines Dead Sea mud. It’s used for company products. Al Haq’s General Director, Shawan Jabarin, said, “The Israeli authorities are denying Palestinians access to their natural resources all across the OPT, but this practice is particularly evident in the occupied Dead Sea area. This also clearly demonstrates how Israel is benefiting economically from the occupation.”
“Given that the settlers in the area and Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories directly profit from the appropriation of the Dead Sea natural resources and from the trade of the products extracted and processed in this region, they should be considered as primary perpetrators of the war crime of pillage.”
Consumers have a right to know that Ahava operates illegally.
Its products use stolen Palestinian resources. Doing so costs them nearly $150 million annually.
Ahava’s based in Mitzpe Shalem settlement.
It lies on the Dead Sea’s western shore.
It’s Israel’s only company licensed to mine area mud, silt, sand, gravel and other minerals.
It operates subsidiaries in America, Britain and Germany.
Its products have unique cosmetic qualities.
They’re used for various skin disorders.
Exports provide about 60 percent of its revenue.
The remaining 40 percent comes from Israel and tourism.
The Dead Sea has unique geographical, mineral, climatic and archeological features.
Its natural resource riches include ground and surface water, springs and minerals.
It’s a potential world heritage site.
Its landscapes are stunning. Its climate is mild. Its potential for economic development is significant.
Its tourism, industry and agriculture thrive.
Israeli development plans include hotels, water parks, shopping malls and urban facilities.
Enhanced mineral and water extraction are also planned.
Palestinians are entirely deprived of what’s rightfully theirs.
The area is also environmentally vulnerable.
Its ecosystem is endangered.
At issue is over-extraction and other abuses.
The Jordan River Basin’s water system is affected.
Large sinkholes emerged.
As many as 3,000 exist.
Dead Sea shrinkage is worrisome.
It’s divided into two lakes.
Upstream water diversion projects and southern Dead Sea mining caused serious sea level erosion.
Over-exploitation is destroying the area. Domestic, agricultural and industrial wastewater flows directly into the Dead Sea.
Surrounding land areas are affected.
In 2004, Ahava got illegal mining rights.
Authority granting them must cease and desist.
Third-party states must demand it.
Pressuring Israel to stop violating international law is vital.
Aiding and abetting lawlessness can’t be tolerated.
Relations with Ahava and other Israeli companies profiteering from pillage must cease.
Importing their products is illegal.
Everything originating from settlements should be barred. Failure to do so constitutes complicity with grand theft and war crimes.
Water is the only issue in which Israel (still) finds it difficult to defend its discriminatory, oppressive and destructive policy with pretexts of security and God
Israeli spokespeople have three answers ready to pull out when they respond to questions on the water shortage in West Bank Palestinian towns – which stands out starkly compared to the hydrological smugness of the settlements: 1) The Palestinian water system is old, so it suffers from water loss; 2) the Palestinians steal water from each other, and from the Israelis; and 3) in general, Israel has in its great generosity doubled the amount of water it supplies to the Palestinians, compared to what was called for in the Oslo Accords.
“Supplies,” the spokespeople will write in their responses. They will never say Israel sells the Palestinians 64 million cubic meters of water a year instead of the 31 million cubic meters agreed to in the Oslo Accords. Accords that were signed in 1994, and that were supposed to come to an end in 1999.
They will not say that Israel sells the Palestinians water that it first stole from them.
Bravo for the demagogy. Bravo for the one-eighth portion of truth in the answer. Water is the only issue in which Israel (still) finds it difficult to defend its discriminatory, oppressive and destructive policy with pretexts of security and God. That is why it must blur and distort this basic fact: Israel controls the water sources.
And being in control, it imposes a quota on the amount of water the Palestinians are allowed to produce and consume. On average, the Palestinians consume 73 liters per person per day. Below the recommended minimum.
Israelis consume a daily 180 liters on average, and there are those who say even more. And here, unlike there, you will not find thousands who consume 20 liters a day. In the summer.
True, some Palestinians steal water. Desperate farmers, regular chiselers.
If it was not for the water shortage, it would not happen.
A large part of the thefts are in Area C, under full Israeli control. So please, let the IDF and police find all the criminals.
But to justify the crisis with theft – that is deceit.
With the Oslo Accords, Israel imposed an outrageous, racist, arrogant and brutal division of water sources in the West Bank: 80 percent for Israelis (on both sides of the Green Line), and 20 percent for the Palestinians (from wells drilled before 1967, which the Palestinians continued to operate; from the Mekorot water company; from future wells to be drilled in the eastern basin of the mountain aquifer; from agricultural wells and springs.
Many of the springs, by the way, dried out because of Israeli deep wells, or because the settlers took them over. The ways of theft know no bounds.)
Twenty percent is actually good, because now only about 14 percent of the water from the mountain aquifer is accessible to Palestinians in the West Bank.
Technical reasons, irregularities and human error, insufferable Israeli bureaucratic foot-dragging, whose entire goal is to delay the development of the Palestinian water infrastructure and the upgrading of what now exists; unexpected difficulties in producing water from wells in the allowed places, old wells that have dried out or whose production has fallen, and which Israel does not allow to be replaced by newly-drilled wells – all these explain how we have reached 14 percent instead of what was signed in Oslo, and why Israel sells the Palestinians more water that it committed to back then.
After all, it has been left with more water to produce from this natural resource, which, according to international law, an occupying country is forbidden to use for the purposes of its civilian population.
During the summer, the problem becomes worse, of course.
The heat rises and the Palestinians’ demand for water rises, not just the settlers’.
So in the Salfit district and east of Nablus, Mekorot reduces the amount of water it sells to Palestinians.
The spokespeople will not state it that way.
They will say “regulating,” they will say, too. that in the settlements “there are also complaints about a water shortage” (it seems I missed the report on Arutz 7 about it).
But in Farkha, Salfit and Deir al-Hatab people describe, on the verge of tears, how humiliating it is to live for weeks without running water.
And we have not even spoken about the dozens of Palestinian communities on both sides of the Green Line that Israel, a light unto the nations, refuses to allow to connect to the water infrastructure.
Israel invented the word Mizrahim to strip Arab Jews of their histories as they tried to do with Palestinians.
yemeni jews 1949 ap Three Mizrahi Jews reading a copy of the Hebrew Bible at a Jewish refugee camp, March 3, 1949 [AP] Mizrahi Jews (Hebrew: יהודי המִזְרָח
The State of Israel was conceived at the turn of the 20th century in Eastern Europe by a group of elite European Jews who launched a movement called Zionism that sought to establish a physical nation state exclusive to Jews.
It was a typical settler colonial enterprise, complete with the narrative of a divine mandate and a non-existent or savage indigenous population, central to which was the myth that Jews of the world formed a singular people, favored by God, who were returning to their singular place of origin – Palestine – after a three thousand year absence.
Israel’s outrageous fabrications about the immigration of Arab Jews to Israel in the 1940s and 50s are an attempt to mask the injustices meted out to Palestinians
Israeli propaganda about the “expulsion” of Arab Jews from Arab countries in the late 1940s and early 1950s continues without respite.
Earlier this month, Israel’s UN ambassador, Gilad Erdan, informed UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres that he “intends to submit a draft resolution requiring the international body to hold an annual commemoration for the hundreds of thousands of Jews exiled from Arab countries due to the creation of the State of Israel,” according to a report in Ynet.
The history of Arab Jewish immigration to Israel is not one of expulsion by Arab regimes, but rather one of Israeli criminal actions and conspiracies
Israel’s fabrications about the immigration of Arab Jews to Israel are so outrageous that the country holds a commemoration on 30 November each year.
This date just happens to coincide with the ethnic cleansing by Zionist gangs of Palestine, which began on 30 November 1947, a day after the UN General Assembly adopted the Partition Plan.
The choice of date seeks to implicate Arab Jews in the conquest of Palestine, when most had no role in it.
Erdan alleges that, after the establishment of the Israeli settler-colony, Arab countries “launched a widespread attack against the State of Israel and the thriving Jewish communities that lived within [the Arab world]”.
Israeli fabrications, with which Israel always hoped to force Arab countries into paying Israel billions of dollars, have a second important goal: to exonerate Israel from its original sin of expelling Palestinians in 1948 and stealing their land and property.
Ideological pitfalls
In December 1948, the UN General Assembly mandated that Palestinian refugees be allowed to return home and that they be compensated for the destruction and theft of their property by Israel. Israel not only wants to hold on to all of those lands, but to extort Arab countries to pay out billions more.
There is a further irony to the Israeli ploy: Israel has always insisted that Palestine, and later Israel, is the homeland of world Jewry, while simultaneously claiming that Arab Jews who immigrated to Israel are “refugees”.
The legal and internationally accepted definition of a refugee, however, is of a person who was expelled or fled their homeland, not one who “returns” to their homeland.
President of the Egyptian Jewish Community Magda Shehata Haroun at the Shaar Hashamayim Synagogue in Cairo on 3 October, 2013 (AFP)
These ideological pitfalls aside, the history of Arab Jewish emigration to Israel is not one of expulsion by Arab regimes, but rather one of Israeli criminal actions that forced Jews in Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, Egypt and other countries to leave for Israel.
In 1949, the Israeli government was working assiduously with British colonial authorities in Aden and with Yemeni officials to airlift Yemeni Jews to Israel. While the League of Arab States had resolved to ban the emigration of Arab Jews to Israel, Yemen’s imam allowed Jews to leave as early as February 1949, with the help of Zionist emissaries and Israeli bribes to provincial Yemeni rulers, according to prominent Israeli historian Tom Segev’s book: 1949: The First Israelis.
Some provincial rulers asked that at least 2,000 Jews remain, as it was the religious duty of Muslims to protect them, but the Zionist emissary insisted that it was a Jewish religious “commandment” for them to go to the “Land of Israel”. The fact that Israel’s prime minister at the time was David Ben Gurion also suggested to many that Israel “was the kingdom of David,” according to Segev and other sources. Tens of thousands of Jews were urged to leave their homes and travel to Israel.
Institutionalized discrimination
As for the Jews who opted to stay, the Jewish emissary in Aden, Shlomo Schmidt, asked permission to propose that Yemeni authorities expel them, but Yemeni authorities did not.
Some of the luggage of the departing Jews, including ancient Torah scrolls, jewellery and embroidered garments, which they were encouraged to bring with them, disappeared en route and mysteriously “made their way to antique and souvenir shops in Israel,” according to Segev and other sources.
About 50,000 Yemeni Jews were essentially removed from Yemen by the Israelis in 1949 and 1950 to face institutionalised Ashkenazi discrimination in Israel.
This included the abduction of hundreds of Yemeni children from their parents, who were told the children died; the children were then allegedly handed over for adoption to Ashkenazi couples.
Arab rulers and Israel’s leaders: A long and secret history of cooperation
Zionists were also active in bringing about the emigration of Morocco’s Jews to Israel.
Morocco was under French colonial occupation at the time, so the Jewish Agency had to strike an agreement with the French governor of Morocco to bring about the emigration of Moroccan Jews, who had to face horrific conditions on Israeli ships, according to Segev and other sources.
Some of the 100,000 Jews who left, according to the Jewish Agency emissary, had to be virtually “taken aboard the ships by force”.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi government of Nuri al-Said, Britain’s strongman in the Arab east, was maligned by Israeli propaganda that it was persecuting Jews, when in fact these were Israeli fabrications.
Zionist agents had been active in Iraq, smuggling Jews through Iran to Israel, which led to the prosecution of a handful of Zionists.
Then, attacks on Iraqi Jews began, including at the Masuda Shemtov synagogue in Baghdad, killing four Jews and wounding around a dozen more.
Some Iraqi Jews believed that this was the work of Mossad agents, aiming to scare Jews into leaving the country. Iraqi authorities accused and executed two activists from the Zionist underground.
Amid Israel’s global campaign to pressure Iraq into allowing Jews to leave – which led to Israeli attempts to block a World Bank loan to Iraq, accompanied by American and British pressure – the Iraqi parliament relented and issued a law permitting Jews to leave.
Zionist agents in Iraq telegraphed their handler in Tel Aviv: “We are carrying on our usual activity in order to push the law through faster.”
Iraq’s 120,000 Jews were thus soon transferred to Israel.
Targeting western interests
Among Egypt’s relatively small Jewish community, an even smaller number were Ashkenazi (mostly from Alsace and Russia) who arrived since the 1880s.
The larger community consisted of Sephardi Jews who arrived during the same period from Turkey, Iraq and Syria, in addition to the tiny community of Karaite Jews.
Zionist activism among the small community of Ashkenazi Jews in Egypt led some to go to Palestine before 1948.
However, it was after the establishment of Israel that many of Egypt’s upper-class Jews began to leave to France, not Israel.
Nonetheless, the community remained essentially intact until Israel intervened in 1954, recruiting Egyptian Jews for an Israeli terrorist cell that placed bombs in Egyptian cinemas, the Cairo train station as well as American and British educational institutions and libraries.
The Israelis hoped that by targeting western interests in Egypt, they could sour the then-friendly relations between Egypt’s president and the Americans.
Egyptian intelligence uncovered the Israeli terrorist ring and tried the accused in open court.
The Israelis mounted an international campaign against Egypt and president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was dubbed “Hitler on the Nile” by the Israeli and western press, while Israeli agents shot at the Egyptian consulate in New York, according to David Hirst’s book The Gun and the Olive Branch and other sources.
When Israel joined the British-French conspiracy to invade Egypt in 1956, and after its military occupation of the Sinai Peninsula, public rage ensued against the settler-colony.
The Egyptian government detained about 1,000 Jews, half of whom were Egyptian citizens, according to Beinin, and Egypt’s small Jewish community began to leave in droves. On the eve of Israel’s second invasion of Egypt in 1967, only 7,000 Jews remained in the country.
Formal invitations
Despite Israeli culpability in bringing about the exodus of Arab Jews from their countries, the Israeli government continues to blame it on Arab governments.
As for the property of Arab Jews, indeed, they should be fully entitled to it and/or to compensation – not on account of some fabricated expulsion narrative that serves the interests of the Israeli state, but on account of their actual ownership.
Contrary to Israeli propaganda that there was a population swap, it is notable that while European and Arab Jews who emigrated to Israel were given the stolen land and properties of expelled Palestinians free of charge, according to Israeli historian Benny Morris and other sources, the Palestinians did not receive the property of the Arab Jews who migrated to Israel.
A picture dated before 1937 during the British Mandate in Palestine shows Arabs demonstrating in the Old City of Jerusalem against the Jewish immigration to Palestine (AFP)
Indeed, the Palestine Liberation Organization, which in 1974 received recognition by the Arab League and the UN as “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” was very aware of this Israeli strategy.
Understanding that the emigration of Arab Jews to Israel was a boon to the Israeli settler-colony, the PLO demanded, in a much-publicised 1975 memorandum to the Arab governments whose Jewish populations had left to Israel, that they issue formal and public invitations for Arab Jews to return home.
Notably, none of the governments and regimes in power in 1975 were in office when the Jews left between 1949 and 1967.
Neither Israel nor its Arab Jewish communities heeded the calls.
Rewarding crimes
All this aside, there is the matter of Israel’s unceasing attempts to equate the financial losses of Arab Jews with those of Palestinian refugees.
A conservative official Israeli estimate comparing Palestinian property losses to Arab Jewish property losses gave a ratio of 22 to one in favour of Palestinians – despite Israel’s gross overestimation of Arab Jewish losses and even grosser underestimation of Palestinian losses.
How the Arab League helped dissolve the Palestinian question
Researchers’ conservative estimates of Palestinian refugee losses amount to more than $300bn in 2008 prices, excluding damages for psychological pain and suffering, which would raise the total substantially.
This excludes the losses in confiscated land and property for Palestinian citizens of Israel since 1948, and the losses incurred by Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem since 1967.
Whereas none of the Arab regimes in power when Arab Jews emigrated to Israel exists today, the same Israeli colonial-settler regime that expelled the Palestinian people and engineered the exodus of Arab Jews from their countries remains in power.
Yet, in his letter, Erdan complains that “it is infuriating to see the UN mark a special day and devote a lot of resources for the issue of ‘Palestinian refugees,’ while abandoning and ignoring hundreds of thousands of Jewish families deported from Arab countries and Iran”.
The irony of Erdan’s letter is that it demands that the Israeli regime be financially and morally rewarded for the crimes it has committed over the last seven decades.
A 19 yr-old US-Israeli dual citizen was arrested by Israeli police – in conjunction with an ongoing FBI investigation into the supposed wave of threats made to Jewish communities and institutions in the United States, as well as in several other countries over the past few months. So far, the suspect is said to be behind the majority of the threats – and used cyber-camouflage software to conceal his identity while carrying out his erroneous false flag actions.
It has been a normal couple of weeks for reporting on what is going on in Israel, which is to say that the bad things it has been doing have been carefully suppressed by the US government and the media.
The Israelis continue their program to isolate, humiliate and terrify the Palestinians by destroying their civil and human rights organizations while also limiting foreigner access to the remaining Arab inhabited areas on the West Bank.
Israeli Jews now routinely refer to all Palestinians as “terrorists” to justify the harsh measures used to steal their land and homes while also destroying their livelihoods.
The so-called Israel Defense Forces, whose Chief Rabbi Eyal Karim approves of his soldiers raping ‘attracting Gentile women’ as a way to keep up morale, are also continuing to kill Palestinians at an unprecedented rate and have covered-up the murder four months ago of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, admitting only that the woman was apparently killed by a soldier who claimed that he thought her to be an armed Arab rioter.
No further action will be taken. A US State Department briefer accepted the verdict saying that the action “underscore[s] the importance of accountability in this case, such as policies and procedures to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.”
Actually, the Israeli statement does no such thing as it lacks any accountability.
The White House should have blocked the $3.3 billion gift that Israel gets every year from the US Treasury for starters.
And the shoot-first policies by Israeli soldiers will continue, a position emphasized by Israel’s Prime Minister Yair Lapid, who firmly rejected proposals to change the Army’s current rules of engagement which led to the Akleh killing, saying that he would not allow outsiders to “dictate our open-fire policies.”
When it comes to the exercise of Jewish power in the United States, the word “hypocrisy” should immediately come to mind.
A recent report on extremism in America has been compiled by the indefatigable Anti-Defamation League (ADL) which has a “Center on Extremism” that has examined “more than 38,000 names on leaked Oath Keepers membership lists and identified more than 370 people it believes currently work in law enforcement agencies — including as police chiefs and sheriffs — and more than 100 people who are currently members of the military.
It also identified more than 80 people who were running for or served in public office as of early August… The data raises fresh concerns about the presence of extremists in law enforcement and the military who are tasked with enforcing laws and protecting the US.”
It is not hard to guess what the ADL didn’t look for: radical armed “extremist” Jewish groups fundraising and operating cooperatively in the US and Israel.
Nor did it look at black radical groups like Black Lives Matter and the other organizations that were spawned in the wake of the George Floyd death that have produced chaos in a number of American cities.
Only white conservatives need apply under the standards of “extremism” set by the ADL, which should surprise no one.
The issue of Jewish and Israeli invisibility when they are doing something horrific struck me recently when I attended a peace rally that included a number of speakers over the course of about five hours.
The theme of the gathering was resistance to the warmongering policies that have driven the US government to the verge of nuclear war.
When the event was concluded I observed that Israel or the Jewish/Israeli Lobby had not even been mentioned once, even when describing situations in the Middle East that begged for a comment regarding Israeli complicity and its dominance over US policy in the region.
One particularly delusional speaker, who would benefit from a basic course in Middle Eastern history, actually claimed that the current hostility between Washington and Tehran is the result of the CIA overthrow of Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1954.
That constitutes a cute evasion of reality but the fact is that US-Iran policy is driven not by lingering concerns over Mossadegh, but rather by Israel and its lobby.
To illustrate the level of Israeli control, President Joe Biden bowed to Israeli pressure and has placed “off the table” any consideration of a new nuclear non-proliferation deal with Iran, even though it would be in America’s interest.
There are no other significant American national interests as Iran does not actually threaten the United States or its economy.
The reality is that the US military is in Syria and Iraq for the same reason, i.e. to provide protection and support for Israel, while it also heavily bribes Israel’s neighbors in Egypt and Jordan to keep the peace with the Jewish state.
It is all a world turned upside down with Israel controlling Washington, as former prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu have boasted, and part of the control mechanism is to manage the narrative so the American public never really sees what is going on.
But what is really interesting is how so-called peace activists, like at the gathering I attended, toe the line and are terrified of offending Israel or the powerful domestic Jewish groups that use their money and political access to promote the wars in the Middle East as well as against Russia in Ukraine.
Some of them clearly are fearful of being labeled anti-Semites, which is the weapon most frequently used by groups like ADL to ward off criticism of the Jewish state.
Interestingly, one of the speakers at the meeting I attended demonstrated how it is possible to make a point about Israel and the Jewish power behind it without using either the “I” or “J” word.
He observed that the foreign and national security policies of both major US political parties are largely driven by the personal interests of their donors, whom he described as “billionaire oligarchs, some of whom are not even Americans.”
The allusion was pretty clear to most members of the audience.
It sure sounded like arch globalist George Soros, who has used his money to corrupt local and state governments, and, more to the point, Israeli citizens Haim Saban and the recently deceased Sheldon Adelson.
Hollywood denizen Saban, the top single contributor to the Democrats, has said that he is a “one issue guy” and that issue is Israel.
Adelson, who is buried in Israel, contributed $100 million to the Republicans and was the man who in return got President Donald Trump to move the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, recognize the incorporation of the Golan Heights into the Israeli state, and have a free hand to suppress the Palestinians.
The good news is, however, that pushback is developing, and it is in part coming from some Jews.
The Jewish peace group Tikkun has recently published a devastating article by Jeffrey Sachs on the Jews who have been activists for Israel who have been agitating for the post 9/11 wars.
It is entitled “Ukraine Is the Latest Neocon Disaster” and describes how “The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement.
The Biden Administration is packed with the same neocons who championed the US wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The neocon track record is one of unmitigated disaster, yet Biden has staffed his team with neocons.
As a result, Biden is steering Ukraine, the US, and the European Union towards yet another geopolitical debacle…”
It is actually worse than that as a global nuclear confrontation threatens.
It is time for those in America and Europe who genuinely want peace to begin to be honest about who is pushing for the wars and why.
Euphemisms and evasions to avoid offending the culprits help no one and just empower those who believe themselves “chosen” and would seek to establish the supremacy of one particular ethno-religious state even if it brings disaster to everyone else.
Former U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, contradicted President Biden’s tout that opening airspace over Saudi Arabia to allow for flights to and from Israel is a “big deal,” contrarily remarking that he had flown over Saudi territory many times.
Friedman also told “Fox & Friends Weekend” Sunday that Biden’s Middle East trip was a “huge missed opportunity.”
AMB. DAVID FRIEDMAN: It’s not significant because I’ve flown over Saudi Arabia lots of times already on the way to Abu Dhabi, on the way to Bahrain, on the way to Dubai.
I think most significantly, I don’t think the Saudis themselves view this as significant.
I mean, they’ve made it clear that this has nothing to do with any normalization or reconciliation with Israel.
They’ve walked it back already.
You know, by the time the president was on Air Force One, this was being walked back.
So, no, it’s not significant then… I think we would expect much more in the future with that relationship.
US amb. to “Israel” : The US State Department’s two-state policy is grounded in anti-Semitism “The US State Department – with a hundred-year history of anti-Semitism – promotes the payoff of corrupt Palestinians in exchange for their completely duplicitous agreement to support a two-state solution.” (August 2015)
Nothing should better qualify me to write about world affairs at the moment – and Western meddling in Ukraine – than the fact that I have intimately followed the twists and turns of Israeli politics for two decades.
We will turn to the wider picture in a moment. But before that, let us consider developments in Israel, as its “historic,” year-old government – which included for the very first time a party representing a section of Israel’s minority of Palestinian citizens – teeters on the brink of collapse.
Crisis struck, as everyone knew it would sooner or later, because the Israeli parliament had to vote on a major issue relating to the occupation: renewing a temporary law that for decades has regularly extended Israel’s legal system outside its territory, applying it to Jewish settlers living on stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank.
That law lies at the heart of an Israeli political system that the world’s leading human rights groups, both in Israel and abroad, now belatedly admit has always constituted apartheid.
The law ensures that Jewish settlers living in the West Bank in violation of international law receive rights different from, and far superior to, those of the Palestinians that are ruled over by Israel’s occupying military authorities.
The law enshrines the principle of Jim Crow-style inequality, creating two different systems of law in the West Bank: one for Jewish settlers and another for Palestinians. But it does more.
Those superior rights, and their enforcement by Israel’s army, have for decades allowed Jewish settlers to rampage against Palestinian rural communities with absolute impunity and steal their land – to the point that Palestinians are now confined to tiny, choked slivers of their own homeland.
In international law, that process is called “forcible transfer,” or what we would think of as ethnic cleansing.
It’s a major reason that the settlements are a war crime – a fact that the International Criminal Court in the Hague is finding it very hard to ignore.
Israel’s leading politicians and generals would all be tried for war crimes if we lived in a fair, and sane, world.
So what happened when this law came before the parliament for a vote on its renewal?
The “historic” government, supposedly a rainbow coalition of leftwing and rightwing Jewish parties joined by a religiously conservative Palestinian party, split on entirely predictable ethnic lines.
Members of the Palestinian party either voted against the law or absented themselves from the vote.
All the Jewish parties in the government voted for it.
The law failed – and the government is now in trouble – because the rightwing Likud Party of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joined the Palestinian parties in voting against the law, in the hope of bringing the government down, even though his legislators are completely committed to the apartheid system it upholds.
UPHOLDING APARTHEID
What is most significant about the vote is that it has revealed something far uglier about Israel’s Jewish tribalism than most Westerners appreciate.
It shows that all of Israel’s Jewish parties – even the “nice ones” that are termed leftwing or liberal – are in essence racist.
Most Westerners understand Zionism to be split into two broad camps: the right, including the far-right, and the liberal-left camp.
Today this so-called liberal-left camp is tiny and represented by the Israeli Labour and Meretz parties.
Israel’s Labour Party is considered so respectable that Britain’s Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, publicly celebrated the recent restoration of ties after the Israeli party severed connections during the term of Starmer’s predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn.
But note this. Not only have the Labour and Meretz parties been sitting for a year in a government led by Naftali Bennett, whose party represents the illegal settlements, they have just voted for the very apartheid law that ensures the settlers get superior rights over Palestinians, including the right to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land.
In the case of the Israeli Labour Party, that is hardly surprising.
Labour founded the first settlements and, apart from a brief period in the late 1990s when it paid lip service to a peace process, always backed to the hilt the apartheid system that enabled the settlements to expand.
None of that ever troubled Britain’s Labour Party, apart from when it was led by Corbyn, a genuinely dedicated anti-racist.
But by contrast to Labour, Meretz is an avowedly anti-occupation party.
That was the very reason it was founded in the early 1990s. Opposition to the occupation and the settlements is supposedly hardwired into its DNA.
So how did it vote for the very apartheid law underpinning the settlements?
UTTER HYPOCRISY
The naïve, or mischievous, will tell you Meretz had no choice because the alternative was Bennett’s government losing the vote – which in fact happened anyway – and reviving the chances of Netanyahu returning to power. Meretz’s hands were supposedly tied.
This argument – of pragmatic necessity – is one we often hear when groups professing to believe one thing act in ways that damage the very thing they say they hold dear.
But Israeli commentator Gideon Levy makes a very telling point that applies far beyond this particular Israeli case.
He notes that Meretz would never have been seen to vote for the apartheid law – whatever the consequences – if the issue had been about transgressing the rights of Israel’s LGBTQ community rather than transgressing Palestinian rights.
Meretz, whose leader is gay, has LGBTQ rights at the top of its agenda.
Levy writes: “Two justice systems in the same territory, one for straight people and another for gay people?
Is there any circumstance in which this would happen? A single political constellation that could bring it about?”
The same could be said of Labour, even if we believe, as Starmer apparently does, that it is a leftwing party.
Its leader, Merav Michaeli, is an ardent feminist.
Would Labour, Levy writes, “ever raise its hand for apartheid laws against [Israeli] women in the West Bank?
Two separate legal systems, one for men and another for women? Never. Absolutely not.”
Levy’s point is that even for the so-called Zionist left, Palestinians are inherently inferior by virtue of the fact that they are Palestinian.
The Palestinian gay community and Palestinian women are just as affected by the Israel’s apartheid law favoring Jewish settlers as Palestinian men are.
So in voting for it, Meretz and Labour showed that they do not care about the rights of Palestinian women or members of the Palestinian LGBTQ community.
Their support for women and the gay community is dependent on the ethnicity of those belonging to these groups.
It should not need highlighting how close such a distinction on racial grounds is to the views espoused by the traditional supporters of Jim Crow in the U.S. or apartheid’s supporters in South Africa.
So what makes Meretz and Labour legislators capable of not just utter hypocrisy but such flagrant racism? The answer is Zionism.
Zionism is a form of ideological tribalism that prioritizes Jewish privilege in the legal, military and political realms.
However leftwing you consider yourself, if you subscribe to Zionism you regard your ethnic tribalism as supremely important – and for that reason alone, you are racist.
You may not be conscious of your racism, you may not wish to be racist, but by default you are.
Ultimately, when push comes to shove, when you perceive your own Jewish tribalism to be under threat from another tribalism, you will revert to type.
Your racism will come to fore, just as surely as Meretz’s just did.
DECEPTIVE SOLIDARITY
But of course, there is nothing exceptional about most Israeli Jews or Israel’s Zionist supporters abroad, whether Jewish or not.
Tribalism is endemic to the way most of us view the world, and rapidly comes to the surface whenever we perceive our tribe to be in danger.
Most of us can quickly become extreme tribalists.
When tribalism relates to more trivial matters, such as supporting a sports team, it mostly manifests in less dangerous forms, such as boorish or aggressive behavior.
But if it relates to an ethnic or national group, it encourages a host of more dangerous behaviors: jingoism, racism, discrimination, segregation and warmongering.
As sensitive as Meretz is to its own tribal identities, whether the Jewish one or a solidarity with the LGBTQ community, its sensitivity to the tribal concerns of others can quickly dissolve when that other identity is presented as threatening.
Which is why Meretz, in prioritizing its Jewish identity, lacks any meaningful solidarity with Palestinians or even the Palestinian LGBTQ community.
Instead, Meretz’s opposition to the occupation and the settlements often appears more rooted in the sentiment that they are bad for Israel and its relations with the West than that they are a crime against Palestinians.
This inconsistency means we can easily be fooled about who our real allies are.
Just because we share a commitment to one thing, such as ending the occupation, it doesn’t necessarily mean we do so for the same reasons – or we attach the same importance to our commitment.
It is easy, for example, for less experienced Palestinian solidarity activists to assume when they hear Meretz politicians that the party will help advance the Palestinian cause.
But failing to understand Meretz’s tribal priorities is a recipe for constant disappointment – and futile activism on behalf of Palestinians.
The Oslo “peace” process remained credible in the West for so long only because Westerners misunderstood how it fitted with the tribal priorities of Israelis.
Most were ready to back peace in the abstract so long as it did not entail any practical loss of their tribal privileges.
Yitzhak Rabin, the West’s Israeli partner in the Oslo process, showed what such tribalism entailed in the wake of a gun rampage by a settler, Baruch Goldstein, in 1994 that killed and wounded more than 100 Palestinians at worship in the Palestinian city of Hebron.
Rather than using the murder spree as the justification to implement his commitment to remove the small colonies of extreme settlers from Hebron, Rabin put Hebron’s Palestinians under curfew for many months.
Those restrictions have never been fully lifted for many of Hebron’s Palestinians and have allowed Jewish settlers to expand their colonies ever since.
American Jews are actually being trained since childhood to interact with non-Jews in a deceitful and arrogant manner, in coordination with each other, to emotionally destroy non-Jews and Israel critics in addition to wrecking their careers and interfering with their social relationships. This is actually deliberate, wicked, planned behavior motivated by a narcissistic self-righteous fury. …
Regime Policy, not isolated
CNN Report: The number of strike marks on the tree where Shireen was standing proves this wasn’t a random shot, she was targeted”
How could so many people decide Israeli soldiers murdered the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, when the Palestinian Authority sabotaged the autopsy, leaving it unclear whose bullet actually killed her?
In their own homes
Jew-hatred is highly adaptable
We know that Jew-hatred is the most plastic hatred, forever form-fitted to fit the obsessions of the moment, but this is ridiculous!
Welcome to the ongoing, ever-evolving, Jew-haters’ jamboree.
Here, facts and logic don’t count.
Here, Zionists lurk behind every disaster and evil thought, spreading racism, supremacy, even disease, from COVID-19 to George Floyd’s murder, from Russian invasions to Buffalo massacres.
Still, pity the poor Jew-haters – they know not joy, complexity, subtlety.
These all-or-nothing know-nothing know-it-alls live in a world where, by exaggerating Israel’s evil, they exaggerate Jews’ power, too.
When you deem Zionism Satanic yet Israel keeps thriving, it must be hell on your nerves. [It does but it’s just a matter of time]
Priests stand next to a portrait of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed during an Israeli raid, during a special mass in her memory in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, in the West Bank, May 16, 2022. (credit: MUSSA QAWASMA/REUTERS)
Ask the Palestinians how well this Jew-hatred has worked for them.
It’s kept them stateless, powerless, languishing.
All it has gotten them is Hamas oppressors and PA thugs propping up their dictatorships with Jew-hatred, demonizing Israel to justify squelching Palestinian thought, freedom, prosperity and independence.
Who would want to join this bigot’s banquet?
I prefer living in my blue-and-white world, struggling with occasional grays, to living in their bleak black-and-white world, forever calling for my blood and that of my people.
Exploiting trend after trend and any communal or universal setbacks, they blame everything on the Jews, making Israel the world’s Muck Magnet.
It’s Sisyphean. Zionophobes cook up new recipes – accusations – and then bite into them, only to taste the same stale, bitter Jew-hatred, which poisons their souls, not ours.
Obviously, people can criticize any country, including Israel.
But these obnoxious obsessions and assaults on truth mock history, sociology and political science, sending us passed psychology into psychopathology.
Zionophobia is riddled with what therapists call “cognitive distortions.”
Psychology of bigotry
Psychologists have long shown how perverse perceptions imprison people in misanthropic misconceptions.
CBT – cognitive behavioral therapy – helps patients reframe their understandings of reality.
Beware mental filters, therapists warn, brain fritzes blocking or shrinking the good, the generous, the comforting, while locking in and overinflating the bad, the negative, the unnerving.
Such reframing, such brain fixes, reprogram what people see to be more accurate and constructive.
Instead, regarding Israel, many prefer de-framing – reframing reality to defame.
Popular anti-Zionist perversions include:
Stretching: Anti-Zionists love “kitchen-sinking,” throwing everything at Israel, including the kitchen sink.
How would one exaggerate this?
As bogeymen rise and fall, fanatics try hogtying Israel to the big crime of the moment or the latest, trendiest ideological sin, like the Great Replacement theory, just as Israel is forever accused of racist, imperialist, colonialist crimes other powers committed, not Israel.
Indicting: Any mistake any Israeli makes, or any crime any Israeli commits, supposedly justifies Israel’s permanent place in the dockets of the UN, the International Criminal Court, and much of the human rights community.
Somehow, mini-Israel looms super-large in the craziest worst-case scenarios of the far Left and the far Right.
Daily random arrests
Catastrophizing: It’s all black-and-white, totally bleak, regarding Israel.
Too many conversations about Israel become no-nuance and complexity-free zones.
Anything Israel does ends up integrated into some systematic conspiracy against the always blameless Palestinians.
A journalist can die accidentally in a firefight, yet anti-Israel congresswomen declare that Israeli snipers targeted her, as though these 20-year-old soldiers fighting for their lives knew who she was – or cared.
Calcifying: For anti-Zionists making up twistory, time stands still, nothing ever changes, progress must be ignored.
It’s too much fun to keep shrieking about “Deir Yasin” and the supposed “Nakba,” as though it’s still 1948.
And it’s too tempting to ignore Israel’s many attempts to make peace with Palestinians, its breakthroughs with Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Morocco, and the Sudan, let alone countries like Saudi Arabia, which informally cooperate with the “Zionists.”
Spearheading all this Stretching, Indicting, Catastrophizing, and Calcifying, Palestinian extremists try “Siccing” the world on Israel.
For centuries, crying “Sic ’em” unleashed attack dogs, because owners bark orders in short, punchy ways dogs can hear to “seek” particular targets.
Fittingly, “sic” also highlights when someone erred – making SICC the right acronym for this perverse but increasingly respectable pastime which blindly exploits tragic incidents from Jenin to Buffalo.
The solution: Zionist behavioral therapy
IF CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, cures individuals caught in this perceptual cyclone of negativity, perhaps ZBT – Zionist behavioral therapy – can cure anti-Zionist SICos sucked into this vortex of lies.
Reframing begins with understanding the Zionist trinity: that (one) Jews are a people, with (two) a 3,500-year-old love affair with one piece of land, and (three) the right to establish a state on that homeland.
ZBT emphasizes studying, not stretching or straining; investigating, not indicting; and accepting complexity while viewing everything in proportion, without exaggerating or oversimplifying.
Zionist Criminals who established “Israel” in Palestine for Western imperialists masters.
Going beyond perception into matters of tone and tactics, ZBT also involves talking, not yelling; listening generously, not judging harshly; leaning in, not cutting out.
These approaches are best mastered up close in Israel.
That’s why the tourists crowding Jerusalem’s streets for the first time in two years are so welcome.
But you can reframe with ZBT anywhere, anytime, by opening your mind and maybe even a book, rather than being closed-minded, coldhearted, and so thickheaded and soul-shriveled you see the complex, ultimately redemptive, 3,500-year-old Jewish journey as a one-way march to Zionist villainy.
In the blink of an eye, the Adwan family watched their home get destroyed by Israeli air strikes in May 2021. A year on, Israeli restrictions have stopped them from rebuilding
Mon, 2022-05-16 01:28 RAFAH, GAZA STRIP: Abu Ahmed Adwan was five when his family was forcibly displaced during the Nakba in 1948.
They sought refuge in a camp in the city of Rafah, adjacent to the Palestinian-Egyptian border in the far south of the Gaza Strip.
Adwan grew up in the alleys of the Barbara camp, which got its name from the original village that was abandoned by the Adwan family and other families that settled together.
“We were neighbors in Barbara before the Nakba, and here we are in the camp until the return,” Adwan, now in his late 70s, told Arab News.
Today he is the mayor of his village (the chief of the refugee families from the village of Barbara), and despite spending his life as a refugee, he still believes in the right of return.
“We will return one day, and if we pass away, our children and grandchildren will return and rebuild the country.”
Estimates by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees show that the number of refugees in the Rafah camp grew from 41,000 in 1948 to more than 125,000 today.
Residents in one of the largest camps in the Gaza Strip live in overcrowded houses in narrow streets.
In Gaza, refugees represent more than 70 percent of the population of almost two million people.
Displacement has driven the modern history of the Gaza Strip, a 360-square-kilometer territory on the eastern Mediterranean. The Strip was part of Mandate Palestine’s Gaza subdistrict but became an administrative and political unit after 1948. The Nakba not only established the Gaza Strip’s contemporary borders but also initiated its modern history as the site of continual Israeli displacement policies, which began in the late 1940s and continue to this day.
Adwan uses a large map of the village of Barbara, which tops one of the walls of his meeting hall in his home, to describe the village he visited for the last time about 35 years ago.
He classifies his constant talk of Barbara, and the refugee stories linked to the memory of the Nakba, as a “kind of resistance” in order to keep the memories of past generations alive and encourage the restoration of stolen rights.
He said: “Today’s generation is more aware than their parents and grandfathers than the generation of the Nakba, and the experience of the Nakba in 1948 cannot be repeated again.”
Mohammed Adwan, born in 1970, is a freed prisoner of an Israeli jail.
He said: “The camp is the storehouse of the revolution since the Nakba, and the fathers and grandfathers are its fuel by constantly talking about Palestine with all this nostalgia.”
He added: “We will return sooner or later.” Adwan said that refugee camps play a role in “resisting the occupation, forming the awareness of successive generations and preserving the national memory.”
He added: “It was important to preserve the names of our original towns and villages, by calling them to the refugee camps, as this is a resistance to the factors of time, and the occupation’s efforts to falsify reality and distort Palestinian geography.”
#OngoingNakba
74 years of oppression and perpetration of massacres against us in #Palestine , the year 1948 is not the only year when Nakba happened, but in fact is the beginning of the Nakba, the last Nakba against us a few days ago in #SaveMasaferYatta against +1000s of us https://t.co/Em2dSAELaL
— Ali Awad #SaveMasaferYatta (@Ali_awad1998) May 15, 2022
The growing population in the camp led to mixing with city neighborhoods.
Simple houses built from brick and roofed with asbestos have largely disappeared, replaced by concrete houses.
A researcher in refugee affairs, Nader Abu Sharekh, said that stories told in the homes of the camps, generation after generation, have made the Palestinian cause “alive and growing.”
The families of each village and city destroyed in the Nakba gathered in neighborhoods inside the new camps to draft names.
They used original names from their homeland, out of love for the land and adherence to the right of return, and to keep the names and meanings present in memory.
In each camp there are streets bearing the names of original homes.
“In the camp, the events of the Nakba are present, and the right of return is an absolute belief,” Abu Sharekh said.
“In wedding parties, they sing historic songs from before the Nakba like Ataba, Mijna, Dabke and Dahia.
“These traditions remained in circulation, so that the homeland remains a title to joy, and the right of return remains in the refugees’ diaries.”
In the camp, old women still wear traditional dress rich in color.
People have allotted part of their yards to plant something that reminds them of their lost orchards and farms.
Sometimes the space is used to construct a hut or tent.
Some of the refugees still bake using traditional clay ovens modeled on the kind lost in their destroyed towns and villages.
Main category: Middle-EastTags: 74th anniversary of NakbaNakbaPalestiniansBarbara Palestinians commemorate 74th anniversary of Nakba amid outcry over funeral attackPalestinians reminisce about Ramadan before the Nakba
Amnesty International warned Israel on Tuesday that forcible transfer of Palestinians under occupation amounts to a war crime, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.
“For three days, Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah have been holding demonstrations in response to the imminent threat of forced eviction for the Salem family, which is slated for next month,” said AI in a tweet, commenting on the serious developments in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
Amnesty added that Israeli security forces have used “unlawful force” to disperse Palestinians demonstrating against the forcible transfer of the Salem family.
It called on the Israeli authorities “to immediately halt forced evictions in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah and end the ongoing forced displacement of Palestinians from East Jerusalem,” warning that “forcible transfer is a war crime and a pillar of Israel’s system of apartheid.”
Amnesty recently stated that Israel is implementing a system of apartheid against the Palestinians under its rule, in a report released on February 1.
Tension started in the neighborhood three days ago after far-right Israeli lawmaker Itamar Ben Gvir, backed by Jewish settlers, set up an office on land owned by the Salem family in Sheikh Jarrah, days after an Israeli court ordered the family to leave its home.
Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, is leading his country’s anti-Palestinian propaganda, this time engaging in pre-emptive hasbara in anticipation of a Palestinian response to the ongoing evictions in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
“Would you consider it a terror attack if a rock like this was thrown at your car while driving with your children?” Erdan asked the United Nations Security Council members, while holding the rock in his hands. “Would you, at the very least, condemn these brutal terror attacks carried out against Israeli civilians by Palestinians?”
This Israeli logic is quite typical, where oppressed Palestinians are depicted to be the aggressor, and oppressive Israel – a racist apartheid state by any standard – presents itself as a victim merely engaging in defending its own citizens.
But Erdan’s selective logic is, this time around, compelled by something else.
His UN charade is merely aimed at creating a distraction from the ongoing horrific events transpiring in Sheikh Jarrah and throughout occupied East Jerusalem.
On Wednesday, January 19, the Palestinian Salhiya family’s home was demolished by Israel, rendering 15 people, mostly children, homeless.
A few days earlier, a heart-wrenching event took place on top of that very site, when members of the Salhiya family threatened to set themselves ablaze as they agonized over the imminent loss of their family home.
“We have nothing left for us in Jerusalem. This is ethnic cleansing.
Today me, tomorrow my neighbours. We’d rather die on our land with dignity than surrender to them,” Mahmoud Salhiya, the owner of the house said, before he was dissuaded by neighbours not to set himself on fire.
These tragic events are being watched closely, first by Palestinians and also by people around the world.
If the momentum of Israeli destruction continues, chances are we could witness another popular uprising.
Erdan’s spectacle at the UN is a desperate act of propaganda to sway members of the international community from criticising Israel.
But Israel is failing at making a case for itself, similar to its failure to defend its horrific violence against Palestinians throughout occupied Palestine in May 2021. Even Israel’s traditional allies are speaking out against the latest round of ethnic cleansing in Sheikh Jarrah.
The US envoy to the United Nations expressed ‘concern’ over the forced expulsion in the Palestinian neighbourhood.
“To make progress, both Israel and the Palestinian Authority must refrain from unilateral steps that exacerbate tensions and undercut efforts to advance a negotiated two-state solution,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield said, using the usually guarded language.
However, Thomas-Greenfield went on to warn against the “annexations of territory, settlement activity, demolitions and evictions – like what we saw in Sheikh Jarrah.”
Also on 19 January, US lawmaker, Rep. Mark Pocan strongly criticised the Israeli decision to forcefully evict the Salhiya family in Sheikh Jarrah.
“Last night, in the cover of darkness & freezing cold, the homes of the Salhiyeh family in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem, were destroyed by Israeli forces leaving 15 people homeless.
This is unacceptable and must end,” Pocan tweeted, adding the popular hashtag #Savesheikhjarrah.
For his part, the UN Middle East special envoy, Tor Wennsland, strongly condemned the expulsion of the Palestinian family by Israeli occupation authorities.
“I call on Israeli authorities to end the displacement and eviction of Palestinians, in line with its obligations under international law, and to approve additional plans that would enable Palestinian communities to build legally and address their development needs,” the UN website reported Wennesland as saying.
Back to Erdan’s display, where he showcased Palestinian ‘terrorism’ by presenting the supposedly damning evidence of a rock.
It must be said that criticising or defending Palestinian resistance, however symbolic, allows Israel to engage in a misleading and frivolous conversation that creates a moral equivalence between the occupier and the occupied, the colonialist and the colonised.
Whether Palestinians use a stone, a gun or a clenched fist to resist and defend themselves, their resistance is morally and legally justifiable.
Israel, on the other hand, like all other military occupiers and colonialists, has neither a moral nor a legal argument to justify its oppression of Palestinians, the destruction of their homes – like that of the Salhiya family – and the killing of their children.
Judging by the growing solidarity with Palestinians everywhere, it is clear that Erdan’s pathetic display is just another exercise in political futility.
Nothing that Israel can say or do will alter the glaring reality, that a new generation of Palestinians is, once again, unifying the Palestinian discourse, namely around Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation.
Whether Israeli oppression is happening in Sheikh Jarrah, in Gaza, or the Naqab desert, Palestinians now collectively respond as one unified political body.
Thanks to the May 2021 rebellion, gone are the days in which Palestinians are expelled from their homes in the middle of the night as if a routine event, with no consequence.
Moreover, the political language that is being used to describe events in Palestine in the international arena is itself changing.
Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ is no longer the knee-jerk reaction that is often used to describe Israeli violence and Palestinian resistance.
And finally, it seems that Israel is no longer the party shaping events in Palestine and controlling the discourse around these events.
Palestinians, and a growing international movement of supporters, are proactively shaping global perceptions of the realities on the ground.
Neither Erdan nor his bosses in Tel Aviv can reverse this Palestinian-led momentum.
His UN display merely reflects the degree of desperation and intellectual bankruptcy of Israel and its representatives.
An article entitled “Who Owns the Land?” which appeared in the August 30, 2002 issue of the Sword of the Lord and in various associational papers, made this interesting statement: “Meanwhile, the Jewish National Fund began to collect money to purchase land in Palestine for Jewish settlement, eventually purchasing 92% of present-day Israel.”
This 92% figure is quite different from the generally accepted and documented figures which indicate that by the time of Israel’s independence in 1948, the Jews had purchased approximately 6% to 7% of modern-day Israel (pre-1967 boundaries).
I wrote twice to the author of “Who Owns the Land?” inviting him to straighten me out and provide documentation for his statement that Jews bought 92% of Israel. I received no reply.
Meanwhile, I checked out the official web site of the Jewish National Fund at www.unitedjerusalem.com, a Jewish, pro-Israel, pro-Zionist web site.
This web site states that the Jewish National Fund purchased 375,000 acres of the land prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
Preparing to take over Palestine resources “The Balfour Declaration Signifies”
Based on a total of 7992 square miles in Israel (pre-1967 boundaries), this means that the Jews purchased a total of 7.33% of Palestine from its previous Arab owners, not 92%.
THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND, THIS LAND IS MY LAND . . . Other authorities agree that the amount of land rightfully purchased from the Arabs by the Jews was about 6-7%.
The article “The Jewish National Fund Land Purchase Methods and Priorities, 1924-1939” by Kenneth W. Stein states that “by May 1948 Jews acquired approximately 2,000,000 of Palestine’s 26,000,000 dunams.”
This is approximately 7.69% of the land, not 92%.
Jack Bernstein in “The Life of an American Jew in Racist-Marxist Israel” says that “by 1920 Jews owned only 2% of Palestine.
By 1948 when Israel declared itself a state, these invading Jews had increased their land ownership; but IT WAS STILL LESS THAN 6%.”
The booklet “Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict” by Jews for Justice in the Middle East states that “in 1948, at the moment that Israel declared itself a state, it legally owned a little more than 6% of the land of Palestine.”
Robin Miller in “The Expulsion of the Palestinians 1947-1948, says, “Before 1948, Jews owned only 1.5 million of the 26 million dunams of land in Palestine . . .
After the eviction of the Palestinians, Israel controlled 20 million dunams, an increase from 6% to 77% of the total.
They simply stole an entire country.” It appears that many Christians are being encouraged to support Israeli land claims over those of the Palestinians, based on this unsubstantiated figure of 92% of the land having been purchased by the Jews.
However, the Jewish National Fund’s own figures indicate that they claim to have purchased only 7.33% of the land by 1948.
Imperialist Crocodile says: “don’t be afraid, I will swallow you peacefully.
Any reader of this article who can document the 92% figure claimed in the article “Who Owns the Land?” is invited to write me at the above address, and submit documentation proving that the folks at the Jewish National Fund are mistaken when they say they purchased only 7.33% of the land.
. . . BUT MOSTLY, THIS LAND IS MY LAND.
Some will say that it doesn’t matter how much of the land of Palestine was purchased by the Jews, since God has given the land to the Jews and therefore they have a right to take it from the Arab owners without paying for it.
There is no Scriptural basis for this supposition. Abraham and David, though they were Jews, paid fair market value for the land they bought from Ephron the Hittite (Genesis 23:16) and from Ornan the Jebusite (2 Samuel 24:21-24, 1 Chronicles 21: 22-25).
Paul, when asked what advantage the Jews had, replied, “Much every way: chiefly, because that unto them were committed the oracles of God,” Romans 3:2. Paul does not mention expropriation of other people’s land as an advantage of being Jewish; he says that the advantage that Jews have is that they were given God’s law, which includes the commandment “Thou shalt not steal.”
There is no Scriptural basis for encouraging Jews or Israelis to disobey that commandment that God gave them.
WALK LIKE AN EGYPTIAN.
Others will say that we are obligated to support modern Israel no matter what, based on Old Testament verses where God states His intention to bless the ancient theocratic state of Israel.
Even preachers who say the Old Testament is not for today, and who militantly oppose those who believe in the Ten Commandments and tithing, will still go to the Old Testament to cite verses where God promises His blessing on national Israel.
They cannot quote any New Testament commands for us to support national Israel, because no such teaching exists.
Can we properly interpret Old Testament statements of God’s intention to bless ancient Israel, to mean that God is commanding that we unconditionally support modern Israel?
The answer is no, unless we are willing to follow the same logic with those verses where God promises His blessing on the Arab nations.
In Isaiah 19:25 the prophet says, “Whom the LORD of hosts shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people.”
Based on this verse, should we not be giving all-out, unconditional financial and military support to the Egyptian government and people, just like we are doing for Israel?
Where are the brigades of “Christian Egyptianists” to travel to Egypt, to plant trees there and help run off all those pesky non-Egyptian “land squatters?”
In Genesis 21:18 God promised to make of Ishmael a great nation.
Why are we not helping to fulfill that prophecy by supporting the Palestinians and all the other Arab nations that are descended from Ishmael?
Why this selective obedience to the Word of God, that causes us to support Israel but not Egypt or Palestine?
The answer, of course, is that our foreign policy in the 21st Century AD is not necessarily determined by expressions of God’s good will toward ancient nations that no longer exist in anything resembling their ancient form.
THEY FOUGHT THE LAW, AND THE LAW WON.
Modern Israel bears no resemblance to the ancient theocratic state of Israel, which was based on obedience to the Old Testament Law and expectation of the Messiah.
Modern Israel not only rejects the Messiah but also rejects Old Testament Law.
For instance, Israel rejects the command to not oppress non-Jews living in its territory, Exodus 12:49, 22:21, 23:9, Leviticus 19:33-34, 25:35, Deuteronomy 10:18-19, 23:7, 24:17, 27:19, and the law against cutting down fruit-bearing trees, Deuteronomy 20:19-20.
It is illogical to appeal to Old Testament Law in support of modern Israel and then turn around and say, “They don’t have to obey Old Testament Law.”
Modern Israel is known for its sex industry and brothels, for its gay pride parades in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and its government-funded abortions.
According to the Jewish Virtual Library, there were 18,785 legal and 16,000 illegal abortions in Israel in 1999.
Israeli critics of abortion have estimated that 1,000,000 Jewish infants were aborted from 1948 to 1992 and have likened this to the Holocaust.
Christian Zionists who send money to Israel, and lobby for American governmental subsidies to Israel, are helping to pay for this mass slaughter of pre-born Jewish children.
As Christians, we ought not to harshly judge or condemn Israel for faults which are found equally in all the Gentile nations of the world.
Nor should we go to the opposite extreme of glorifying the Israeli government and people as being worthy of our uncritical and unconditional support.
Nothing has changed since 1957 when Noel Smith, a leader in the Baptist Bible Fellowship movement, wrote these words in the Baptist Bible Tribune: “Zionism rejects the God of Israel, the God of the Prophets, the God of the Land. Zionism does not base its claim to Palestine on the covenant God made with Abraham.
Zionism refuses to admit that the dispersion of the Jews was an act of God because of the sin of the Jews in rejecting their own Messiah.
Zionism has no consciousness of sin and therefore feels no need of a personal Messiah to atone for sin. Zionism is atheistic, secular, political.
“Zionism, rejecting the God who gave Israel the Land, rejecting the grace which was responsible for the gift, has no valid claims to Palestine – none more than the Arabs.”
It is one of the mysteries of life that some modern evangelical Christians devote so much time, money and effort in support of this anti-God movement called Zionism.
THE LORD GAVE, AND THE LORD HATH TAKEN AWAY.
God gave Palestine to the Jews in Old Testament times, but this did not abrogate the rights of non-Jews to own land in Israel, as we have seen from the examples of Ephron and Ornan. (See also Numbers 9:14 – one ordinance for both the stranger and the native-born Hebrew).
The divine title deed to Palestine no longer belongs to the Jews: it was conditional on their obedience to God (see Genesis 17:9-14, Exodus 19:5-6, Deuteronomy 7:12, Joshua 23:15-16, 1 Kings 9:6-9, 2 Chronicles 7:19-22, Ezekiel 33:24-27).
God finally used the Romans to expel the Jews from the land in 70 AD as a punishment for their crowning example of disobedience of the Law: the rejection and crucifixion of their Messiah (Matthew 21:33-43, 23:38).
Of course, any Jew in Israel today who has paid for his land has a right to that land.
As Christians, we should uphold that sacred property right for all Jews, and we should do the same for all Palestinians who have lawful title to their land.
We are not Communists – we do not believe in the confiscation, without payment, of anyone’s land.
Nor are we racists – we do not advocate that anyone be kicked off his land just because he is of the “wrong” ethnic group.
WHEN I CAN READ MY TITLE CLEAR.
Do you really want to know who owns any particular parcel of land in Israel?
Then do the same thing you would do in America – find out who has the title deed and who has paid for the land.
Forget all the silly debates about whose ancestors were there first, or which ethnic group is more in favor with the Almighty.
Isaiah prophesied of a time when Jews and Arabs would be regarded as equals in the sight of God.
“In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, even a blessing in the midst of the land: Whom the LORD shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance.” Isaiah 19:25-26.
We are living in that day now. The New Testament tells us that there is no difference between the Jew and Gentile (Acts 15:9, Romans 10:12, Galatians 3:28).
The Jews no longer have any advantage by being literal children of Abraham (John 8:39).
The true Israel and the true children of Abraham are those who are born again Christians, Romans 2:28-29, Galatians 3:7.
The true Israel that we are to support is the Family of God or Israel of God (Galatians 6:15-16) composed of born-again Gentiles, Jews, Whites, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Palestinians, Patagonians and Hottentots – not some nation of Christ-rejecting people in the Middle East.
The Bible teaches us that all men, Jews and Gentiles, are of one blood (Acts 17:26) and are equal before God.
That includes Jews and Palestinians. We need to seek justice for all Jewish and Arab property holders in the Middle East, and avoid giving the false impression that God has given any one ethnic group a license to rip off any other group.
Who would believe that nobody likes an occupation? Does it look like “Israel” even fits into the natural equation of the region?
JERUSALEM – As 2021 came to a close, Israel had raised the so-called “Iran Threat” issue to a whole new level.
Upon his promotion in December to Commander of the Israeli Air Force, General Tomer Bar was asked by the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot (Ynet), “Are you able to attack Iran tomorrow?”
His answer was “Yes!” He was then asked, “Will you be able to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities?”
His reply: “There is no scenario where we act over there, and I don’t return and say ‘mission accomplished.’”
In the summer of 2020, The Times of Israelreported that Israel had what it called a “Strategy and Third-Circle Directorate,” which focuses principally on “Israel’s fight against Iran.”
The wording, “Israel’s fight against Iran,” is particularly apt: though more often than not it is described as “Iran’s fight against Israel,” it is, in fact, Israel that is a threat to Iran and not the other way around.
Returning to the interview with the Israeli Air-Force commander, it is as though Israel cannot wait for the opportunity to attack, and indeed, the Ynet reporter who interviewed General Bar was eager.
“Bar,” the story continues, “who will be tasked with carrying out a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities should one be ordered, understands that he may be required to carry out one of the most complex operations in the country’s history.”
Interesting choice of words, considering this possible mission is described as a complex, even daring mission rather than pure madness.
General Tomer Bar, commander of the Israeli Air-Force on the front page of the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot
Not leaving out any details, the interview with Bar continued, “I must assume that it might happen during my tenure, and I understand the magnitude of such an order…
Preparations have been underway for a while, including procurement of the F-35 jets and missile defense systems.”
If such an order is given, “there is no way that I will fly 1,000 kilometers and come home without succeeding in my mission.”
According to the Jerusalem Post, however, this might not be as simple as General Bar thinks.
The U.S. has so far rejected an Israeli request to fast-track the delivery of two tanker aircraft, which are needed to allow the Israeli fighter jets to refuel on their way to Iran.
If plans for a possible military option against Iran’s nuclear plan move forward, Israel will need these tankers.
When asked about the U.S. refusal to expedite the sale of refueling aircraft despite Israel’s request, Bar said the matter has not been finalized and that he “remains hopeful the necessary aircraft would be supplied early.” One would think they were planning a party.
Iran under threat
Iran has been facing continuous threats of attack from Israel and the United States for far too long.
With a population of close to 85 million and a record of not having invaded or initiated a war against another country, one is puzzled at the persistent anti-Iranian rhetoric in the United States and Israel.
Furthermore, even if we consider Iran’s unrelenting support for the Palestinian struggle for freedom and justice and the Iranian refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the Zionist occupation of Palestine, the Israeli threats seem unjustified.
Iran’s positions, while obviously unwelcome to the Israeli government, have remained essentially unchanged and stable for decades and there is no threatening drumbeat coming from Tehran.
Since Iran has had to live under these ongoing threats of attack and has been the victim of crippling U.S. sanctions, it is no surprise that it has invested in building what seem to be impressive military capabilities. According to a report by the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA:
Iran has adapted its military capabilities and doctrine to account for developments by the United States and its allies. Although still technologically inferior to most of its competitors, the Iranian military has progressed substantially over the past few decades.
Iraniran troops march during a military parade marking the anniversary of the Iran-Iraq war. Photo | AP
Furthermore, the report states:
Iran continues to rely on its unconventional warfare elements and asymmetric capabilities – intended to exploit the perceived weaknesses of a superior adversary – to provide deterrence and project power.
This combination of lethal conventional capabilities and proxy forces poses a persistent threat.
The problem with this analysis is the idea that Iran is the one that poses a threat.
On the contrary, Iran is the one under threat.
Furthermore, at least one of the “proxy forces” the report refers to is Hezbollah, an organization created to respond to the brutal Israeli assaults against Lebanon and the consequent 20-year occupation of southern Lebanon.
Finally, the report points out that Iran has a “substantial arsenal of ballistic missiles” and that this arsenal is “designed to overwhelm U.S. forces and our partners in the region.”
This is the most effective deterrent Iran has against an impending Israeli attack.
Iran versus Israel
Iran has over 80 million people with an official defense budget in 2019 of approximately $20.7 billion, or roughly 3.8% of GDP.
Israel has a combined population of around 12 million, though fewer than half are actual citizens with rights, and has a defense budget of just under $19 billion.
The debate over a possible war between Israel and Iran is a favorite among pundits.
As a result, one can find a great deal of information comparing the sizes and capabilities of the two militaries.
A piece in Business Insider from August 2021 titled, “A shadowy fight between Israel and Iran is at risk of becoming a bigger war.
Here’s how their militaries stack up,” is one of many such articles.
It concludes that an allout war between the two countries is unlikely but we are likely to see more of the “shadowy” assaults like the attack on a vessel in the Arabian Sea, which was owned by Israeli billionaire Eyal Ofer.
In 2018 Newsweek published a piece called, “How Does Israel’s Military Compare to Iran?”
The article claims that, while “Israeli military might is underscored by its top notch military-industrial complex, Iran’s military is aging and sub-par.”
Still, Newsweek admits, “[b]oth nations have considerable military clout, and any prolonged confrontation between them would be bloody.”
One would do well to remember that, with all the admiration for Israeli military capabilities and technological superiority, Israel has never fought a war against a disciplined, well-trained, well-equipped, highly motivated military force.
Despite the IDF’s superior military might, most of Israel’s battlefield experience comes from facing off with unarmed protesters. Photo | AP
Israel did attack its neighboring countries and destroy their militaries several times, but then it retreated to the safety of its borders.
Iran is not such a proximate neighbor and, should Israel need to deploy forces, something it never had to do in the past; it would be a logistical nightmare.
Even assuming Israel would rely only on its air force, Iran is a large country, and it is a long flight to Iran and back.
Logistically, this would demand an enormous effort by Israel while the Iranians would have to do nothing but wait and then use their air defenses and long-range missiles.
Furthermore, should a war take place on Iranian soil, there is no military force large, effective or motivated enough to defeat Iran.
Israel’s last face-to-face encounter with a well-disciplined and motivated fighting force was in 2006 in Lebanon.
Israeli ground forces encountered Hezbollah fighters, and things did not go well for the Israelis, who were forced to retreat in humiliation.
Israeli officers who participated in that assault against Lebanon said there were serious logistical and intelligence flaws, and this was just a few short kilometers from their home base.
Imagine what would happen if they were thousands of miles from home.
As the new year begins, we should be thankful that the United States, having suffered two colossal military defeats in the last two decades — one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan — has no stomach or resources to attack a formidable country like Iran.
Apart from that, it would be fair to say that two things prevent an all-out war between Israel and Iran.
The first is that Israel knows that attacking Iran will end in a total Israeli defeat. The second is Iran’s exercise of discipline in the face of ongoing threats by both the U.S. and Israel.
“Israel sees the destruction of Lebanon, along with Syria, as the key to destroying the Arab world. If Lebanon’s power-sharing system can be destroyed, if Christians can be driven out for economic or other reasons in huge numbers and if Lebanon’s different Muslim sects can be got to fight each other (with considerable Persian Gulf State/ISIS help), then Israel would be delighted. The only possible counters to that, besides Iran, are China and Russia. Lebanon’s leaders have some very hard choices ahead,” according to Declan Hayes.
“The reality is that Lebanon has long been in the cross hairs not only of Israel but she is one of the seven countries, along with Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran that General Wesley Clark said the USA had listed for destruction in his 2007 interview,” according to Declan Hayes.
Faraan: Over the past weeks, we have been witnessing a growing tension in Lebanon’s ties with some Arab regimes, which is apparently due to the anti-Saudi comments of Lebanese Information Minister George Kordahi on the Yemen war.
The fact is that Kordahi made these remarks a month before the starting of his role in the government and he was one of the TV presenters, who was proudly invited by the Saudi channels at the same time.
Speaking exclusively to Qods News Agency, Irish political analyst Declan Hayes said on Wednesday that the comments of George Kordahi will undoubtedly have consequences for Lebanon.
“The reality is that Lebanon has long been in the cross hairs not only of Israel but she is one of the seven countries, along with Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran that General Wesley Clark said the USA had listed for destruction in his 2007 interview,” he noted.
The Irish political expert went on to say that “the destruction of those seven countries is the medium term objective of Israel and her allies.
It is within the parameters of those objectives that the Persian Gulf State autocrats work in Yemen, in Lebanon and elsewhere.”
“Although flush with cash, they are not independent actors but, as Yemen shows, can operate only with the military muscle of the USA, Israel and their satellites behind them.
The same applies in the non-military sphere where, for example, Qatar can host the 2022 World Cup and Saudi Arabia can buy English Premier League side Newcastle Utd, all without sanctions or censure because they are the USA’s puppets,” Hayes said, referring to the steps taken by some Arab regimes against Yemen, Syria and Lebanon.
He also talked about the France’s policies towards Lebanon, stressing that “France, along with the West’s other fading powers, see the chance for further booty in Lebanon.
The French, like the Germans, the British and other powers, must sell weapons to those who can afford to pay for them.”
“The military market, along with the financial services and luxury goods market, is not only a lucrative one but it ensures NATO affiliated vultures will never be on the side of justice in Lebanon or anywhere else,” Declan Hayes added.
PNAC: a document between Israel & US [implanted by Israel: Jewish neo-cons]to invade 7 Countries within 5 years to help usher in NWO
The 7 nations on the list of invasion:
🔹 Iraq The war of Iraq was intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by those who believe the United States must seize the opportunity for global domination, even if it means becoming the “American imperialists” that our enemies always claimed we were. [Whistleblower for 9/11 and Iraq war] (https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=ErJQ59qFpTE )
🔹 Lebanon: General Clark has recently said ISIS was created to attack Hezbollah for the Israelis. Israel was defeated by 3,500 Hezbollah fighters in the 2006 Lebanon war. ISIS has fought against Hezbollah but they also attacked Syria and Iraq. The Syrians are Hezbollah’s closest allies. The US hired Jihadist proxy armies including Al Qaeda and ISIS to attack Syria using false allegations of chemical weapons. The US paid the Jihadists to kill 300,000 Syrians including 100,000 Christians.
🔹[Syria] (https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=DvLF9x0kGIs) & Libya President Obama surrounded himself with ‘Soft Power’ advocates like Susan Rice and Samantha Power. Obama did attack [Libya] (https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=1nszLUuILko) and Syria using proxies. That fit in with the ‘Soft Power’ program. It also met the guidance given by Richard Perle in A Clean Break. He had written in 1996 that Syria should be attacked by proxy armies over the issue of chemical weapons. Nobody believed the charges the Obama admin just recently made that Syria was again using chemical weapons to kill civilians. All of the previous allegations had been proven false. Obama followed the Israeli agenda by attacking Libya and Syria for them. My question is… will American people wake up and put a stop to war crimes in Syria? Or will we sit around and let the US murder Assad like they did [Gaddafi?] (https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=LQCwgcZqStc )
🔹 Sudan The USA and Israel encouraged the civil war. Since at least the early 1990s the USA funded the SPLA. Even former U.S president Jimmy Carter acknowledges the US role in destabilizing Sudan in the 1990’s. The Boston Globe in 1999 quoted Carter as saying, “The people in Sudan want to resolve the conflict. The biggest obstacle is US government policy. The US is committed to overthrowing the government in Khartoum. Any sort of peace effort is aborted, basically by policies of the United States…. Instead of working for peace in Sudan, the US government has basically promoted a continuation of the war.” In 2011, the US backed South Sudan independence. A U.N. report in March 2016 accuses [South Sudan’s pro-government forces of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including systematic rape of civilian] (https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=I_6lpOJVWGk). Democracy is not what South Sudan wanted, but it wasn’t up to them. [Democracy in Sudan] (https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=RA50TO7t2mY) was part of the PNAC and the US helped installed it.
🔹 [Somalia & Yemen] (https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=N2XuK10xhzo) The Obama administration supports the Saudis in the Yemen war. Saudi Arabia is responsible for 60 percent of about 3,800 civilian deaths in Yemen, according to a UN human rights office report published in August. Saudi warplanes targeted markets, hospitals, schools and other civilian targets, the report says. The US supports the Saudi war effort by selling arms to the Saudis and providing refueling and logistical assistance. In November 2015 the US announced a $1.29 billion deal for precision munitions specifically meant to replenish Saudi stockpiles used in Yemen. In September 2016 the US Senate gave the go-ahead for a $1.15 billion sale of tanks and other military equipment to Saudi Arabia by blocking the bill opposing the controversial transaction. In December 2016, the Obama administration is [expanding the war to Somalia.] (https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=LMsUSEGFeas)
🔹[Iran] (https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=tvq9pfaB6DI) You might have noticed that the US never did get around to attacking Iran. In 2007 PNAC member Dick Cheney ordered US Navy Seals to attack a US Navy ship in the Persian Gulf so he could use the incident as an excuse to launch World War III by striking Iran for Israel. The Navy Seals refused to obey Cheney’s order so he backed down. Cheney had another go at starting WW III on August 8, 2008 when he and the Israelis convinced the nation of Georgia to fire a tank and artillery barrage at South Ossetia killing almost 2,000 civilians in the first few hours. That did not work out well for the conspirators. Russia defeated the Georgians and their US and Israeli advisers rather quickly. [Whistleblower on Iran] (https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=Z41QaC-xAIo)
Today corporate media is programming the mass population to hate Russia, china and Iran and favor Israel. Are they setting up the foundation for WW3? Russia, Iran, china vs Israel & US? The bankers could possibly get away with this if the majority of Americans fall for their propaganda, but I think many have woke and see right through them.
American soldiers have been subjected to one tour after another in poorly thought out wars. These wars all have something in common, the US banks use our military to invade countries the US banks yet to have control of. We take over their resourses, either it be oil to heroine in Afghan. We overthrow their governments and replace with a friendly puppet/govt to the US banks. The wars in Iraq, Sudan, Yemen, Libya and Syria appear to benefit Israel. Will American soldiers wake up and choose not to fight WW3 for the criminal bankers?
Paul Craig Roberts used the words Murder Incorporated to describe America. We are not a righteous nation defending the poor and oppressed. Historically, Murder Inc was an organized crime syndicate created by Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter who killed people for money. The United States is not being paid to invade countries for Israel. In fact the US paid Israel over $30 billion in aid which the Israelis cycle back in part to buy American politicians.
From the destruction of Palestinian wells to the poisoning of trees; and from the demolition of entire ecosystems to make space for Israel’s apartheid wall, to the use of depleted uranium in its various military offensives against Gaza, Israel has been on an unrelenting mission to destroy Palestine’s environment in all of its manifestations.
It is a myth that only Zionist Israel “made the desert bloom.” On the contrary, since its establishment on the ruins of more than five hundred Palestinian villages and cities that it has destroyed and wiped off the map, Israel has done the exact opposite. The land inhabited by Palestinian Muslims, Christians and Jews for thousands of years has been disfigured beyond belief by Israel in the matter of a few decades.
Those who are not familiar with how Israel, particularly with its military occupation of Palestine, is actively and irreversibly damaging the environment might conclude erroneously that Tel Aviv is at the forefront of the global fight against climate change. The reality is the exact opposite.
In his speech at the UN Climate Change Conference — COP26 — in Glasgow, right-wing Prime Minister Naftali Bennett pushed the Israeli brand of “innovation and ingenuity” to “promote clean energy and reduce greenhouse gases”.
Israel uses this particular brand to sell everything, whether it be promoting itself as the saviour of Africa; helping governments to intercept refugees fleeing from violence and war; pushing deadly weapons in the global market; or, as Bennett did in Scotland, supposedly saving the planet.
Before dismissing Bennett’s rhetoric as empty words, we must remember that some people actually buy into this Israeli propaganda. One of them is American billionaire Bill Gates.
The day after Bennett’s speech, Gates met with the Israeli prime minister on the sidelines of COP26 to discuss the establishment of a “working group” to study potential cooperation “between the State of Israel and the Gates Foundation in the area of climate change innovation,” reported the Times of Israel.
According to the newspaper, Gates, who had asserted in his meeting with Bennett that only innovation can solve the problem of climate change, commented, “That’s really what Israel is known for.”
The Microsoft billionaire’s obsession with “innovation”, however, might have blinded him from addressing other things that Israel is also “known for”: being the world’s leading human rights violator, for example, whose horrific track record of racist apartheid and violence is known to every member state of the United Nations.
Something else that Gates might not be aware of is Israel’s systematic and purposeful destruction of the Palestinian environment, resulting from its occupation of Palestine and Tel Aviv’s insatiable appetite for military superiority and constant “innovation” in terms of arms and ammunition.
Every act that is carried out to entrench the military occupation consolidates Israel’s colonial control and the expansion of illegal Jewish settlements, all of which have a direct impact on the Palestinian environment.
Not a single day passes without a Palestinian tree or orchard being set ablaze or cut down by an Israeli. “Clearing” the Palestinian environment is, and has always been, the prerequisite for constructing or expanding Jewish settlements.
For these colonies to be built, countless trees have to be “removed”, along with the Palestinians who have planted them, cultivated them and harvested them for centuries.
Over the years, millions of Palestinian olive and fruit trees have been uprooted in Israel’s constant demand for more land. The resultant soil erosion in many parts of occupied Palestine speaks volumes of this horrendous ecocide.
A man is seen wearing and holding a Palestinian flag outside the COP26 Summit on 2 November 2021 in Glasgow, United Kingdom. [Peter Summers/Getty Images]
But it does not end there.
For hundreds of illegal Jewish settlements housing more than 600,000 settlers to exist, a heavy price is being exacted from the Palestinian environment on a daily basis.
According to the thorough research of Ahmed Abofou, an independent legal researcher with Al-Haq rights group, illegal Israeli settlements “generate around 145,000 tons of domestic waste daily.”
Indeed, “In 2016 alone, around 83 million cubic metres of wastewater were pumped throughout the West Bank.”
Moreover, Israel has near total control of Palestinian water. It relies on the occupied West Bank’s aquifers to meet its water needs, while denying Palestinians access to their own natural water resources.
According to Amnesty International, the average Israeli receives 300 litres of water per day, while a Palestinian receives just 73 litres.
The problem is accentuated when the water usage of illegal Jewish settlers is also taken into account.
The average settler uses as much as 800 litres per day, while entire Palestinian communities can be denied a drop of water for days and weeks on end, often as a form of collective punishment.
The issue is not just about outright theft, denial of access or unequal distribution of water resources.
It is also about the lack of clean and safe drinking water, an issue that has been highlighted by international human rights groups for many years.
In Hebron Palestinians are attacked if seen on streets by Zionist thugs. They walk above ground.
The result of these unfair policies has forced many Palestinians “to purchase water brought in by trucks” at prices “ranging from 4 to 10 USD per cubic metre,” reported Amnesty.
The human rights organisation highlighted that, for the poorest Palestinian communities, “water expenses can, at times, make up half of a family’s monthly income.”
As bad as the situation may sound, the plight of the besieged Gaza Strip is much worse than that of the occupied West Bank.
The tiny and overcrowded territory is a prime example of Israeli cruelty.
Two million Palestinians living in Gaza are being denied the most basic human rights, let alone freedom of movement.
Since the Israeli military blockade on Gaza started in 2007, the environment of the coastal region has deteriorated on a constant basis.
With restricted access to electricity supplies and bombed-out sewage plants, the Palestinians in Gaza are forced to dump raw sewage into the sea.
Furthermore, Gaza’s main aquifer is now polluted to such an extent that 97 per cent of the available water is undrinkable, according to UN reports.
This is only the tip of the iceberg.
From the destruction of Palestinian wells to the poisoning of trees; and from the demolition of entire ecosystems to make space for Israel’s apartheid wall, to the use of depleted uranium in its various military offensives against Gaza, Israel has been on an unrelenting mission to destroy Palestine’s environment in all of its manifestations.
In truth, Mr Gates, this is what Israel is “known for” by anyone who cares to pay attention. Allowing Bennett to present his country as a potential saviour of humanity, while legitimising Israel with massive investments in “innovation”, mischaracterises — in fact, invalidates — the entire global campaign to truly understand the nature of the climate problem at hand.
Those who are hurting the planet have no right to claim that they are saving it. As it stands, Israel is the enemy of the environment that it ravages wilfully. This is really what it should be “known for”.
Palestinian civil society plays a fundamental role in documenting Israel’s military occupation, empowering local communities, and advocating for Palestinian rights. Israel has long viewed it as a threat.
An aircraft carrier with hundreds of U.S. service members has arrived in Israel. We will conduct a two week joint multi-force training on dense urban area combat & multi-domain capabilities.
We continue to strengthen our capabilities to counter threats in the region.
“Terrorism,” according to the US Department of State, is “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.”
The UN special rapporteur, Martin Scheinin, noted in his 2007 report on the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel that counter-terrorism “should be restricted to the suppression and criminalisation of acts of deadly or otherwise serious physical violence against civilians”.
A clear definition of terrorism entails a commitment to some norms of consistency; as such, it gives rise to counter-terrorism practices in line with the norms and rules of international law and proportionate to the assumed act of terrorism.
The Israeli state’s conceptualisation of terrorism, however, is fluid and comprehensive.
It disregards the conflict power asymmetry and the causal relation between Israel’s occupation and Palestinian anti-occupation activism, violent or otherwise, against civilians or soldiers alike.
Former Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has long implied that the disapproval of Israel’s policies stems from anti-Semitism and the hatred of Israel being the default mode in the region.
Likewise, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s website describes the relationship between Palestinian “terrorism” and the occupation as “historically flawed,” arguing that “Palestinian terrorism” existed long before the 1967 War, since “…the beginning of the renewed Jewish settlement of the Land of Israel over a century ago”.
This rationale suggests that resolving the conflict begins by ending Palestinians’ “irrational hostility”, not by ending the occupation that created that hostility.
It frames most Palestinian dissidence against Israel’s policies as unjustified or anti-Semitic, consequentially as “acts of terrorism.”
Even with this comprehensive conceptualisation of terrorism, labelling six Palestinian rights NGOs as “terrorist organisations” seems to have crossed the line.
Palestinian civil society plays a key role in documenting Israeli human rights violations. [Getty]
Shawan Jabarin, the head of Al-Haq – Palestine’s oldest human rights organization and one of the newly outlawed organisations – said that the Israeli designation was surprising and that the groups had not been given a heads up.
US State Department Spokesperson Ned Price denied that Israel gave the US a heads up about the [then] forthcoming designations.
Even Israeli Ynet Newsdescribed the step as a “surprise move.”
Within the Israeli government coalition, criticisms were fired at Gantz. Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz, leader of the left-wing party Meretz, warned on Israel’s Channel 13 of the “political, diplomatic, and human rights consequences” of the decision. He demanded clear evidence that the organizations were involved in terror activities.
Mansour Abbas, the leader of Ra’am, the only Arab party in the coalition, remained silent on the matter.
Armed with the State Prosecutor Amit Aisman’s support, Gantz refused to back down. He argued that Israel’s internal security, Shin Bet, presented “extensive and convincing” evidence linking the six organisations to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The evidence has not been presented.
“Since 1967, Israel has banned over 400 local and international Palestinian organizations and political parties as being ‘unlawful’ or ‘hostile'”
Palestinian civil society as punishable dissidence
The step might be surprising, but it is by no means in contradiction with Israel’s general policies toward Palestinian civil society since 1948.
Palestinian civil society emerged in the absence of a state, sovereignty, or national independence, and took on the socio-political character of the historical eras in which it formed.
In the three decades preceding the 1948 Nakba, Palestinian nationalism had evolved from community farmers and religious groups to political parties and social clubs to resist illegal Jewish immigration and the British Mandate.
From 1948 to 1965, Palestinian civil society inherited the disorientation and political stagnation that characterized the era and was therefore ineffective.
The newly displaced Palestinians, however, were permitted to join trade unions or political parties in their host countries – mainly Jordan, Syria, and Iraq – provided they did not clash with the local governments’ agendas.
Egypt banned civil society groups in the Gaza Strip during that period.
From 1965 onwards, the inception of the PLO followed by Israel’s 1967 occupation of the rest of historic Palestine, reinvigorated Palestinian nationalism and, with it, civil society.
In the 1970s, groups began to focus on advocacy and the delivery of services, and during the First Intifada (1987-93) were instrumental in fostering international solidarity with Palestine.
Over 600,000 Israeli settlers live in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, in violation of international law. [Getty]
Since Oslo in the mid-1990s, the civil society sector has grown significantly and its role has diversified.
The Palestinian Authority’s limitations made local groups more influential, acting as key players in state-building efforts.
Today, these organisations are amongst the best-funded globally, obtaining most of their funding from donor states and playing a key role in social and economic development in the 1967-occupied territories.
They increasingly fill the gap in government provision, as well as empowering local communities.
The Palestinian civil sector, in other words, is the direct product of Palestinian historical and socio-political circumstances. It reflects the complexities and challenges faced by Palestinians, thus, representing an extension of the Palestinian national consciousness.
Because of that, the role played by Palestine’s civil society organizations, especially human rights groups, is seen by the Israeli state as counteractive to its interests in the occupied territories and globally.
Much of the work is deemed dissidence on par with other Palestinian forms of anti-occupation activities and, therefore, subject to Israel’s counter-terrorism procedures.
Israel’s new counter-terrorism law in 2016 allows the authorities to use their extensive powers over organizations and residents of the occupied Palestinian territories.
They can block funds for these organizations and detain their workers or anyone providing professional or moral support for them, as well as seize and confiscate equipment and documents.
“It is deeply regrettable for the US to withdraw from UNESCO, the UN agency promoting education for peace & protecting culture under attack” pic.twitter.com/9dPK4PEGES
— UNESCO 🏛️ #Education #Sciences #Culture 🇺🇳😷 (@UNESCO) October 12, 2017
Ultimately, the Israeli army and police took it as a matter of operational and tactical necessity to routinely storm Palestinian NGOs in the occupied West Bank, arresting their employees, confiscating their content, and shutting them down temporarily or permanently.
“Israel’s new counter-terrorism law in 2016 allows the authorities to use their extensive powers over organizations and residents of the occupied Palestinian territories.
They can block funds for these organizations and detain their workers or anyone providing professional or moral support”
In 2002, 2012, and 2019, Israeli forces stormed Addameer’s premises in Ramallah – currently one of the six outlawed NGOs – arrested staff members, destroyed filing cabinets, and confiscated computers and documents. The Israeli military said the NGOs were linked to the PFLP.
In June this year, the Israeli army shut down the Ramallah-based Health Work Committee for six months, citing security reasons for the closure.
Since 1967, Human Rights Watch noted, Israel has banned over 400 local and international Palestinian organisations and political parties as being “unlawful” or “hostile.”
In occupied East Jerusalem, between 1967 and 2019, Israel shut down or listed as “possible closure” over 100 media and civil society organisations.
Among them is Bayt Al-Sharq (Orient House), Palestine’s prominent archival organisation, the former home of the Palestinian negotiation team, and previously the Jerusalem headquarters of the PLO.
The organization was closed in 2001 and, ever since, the closure has been automatically renewed every six months.
![A man is seen wearing and holding a Palestinian flag outside the COP26 Summit on 2 November 2021 in Glasgow, United Kingdom. [Peter Summers/Getty Images]](https://i1.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/GettyImages-1236293330.jpg?resize=933%2C622&quality=85&strip=all&zoom=1&ssl=1)
