In 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joined world leaders in a rally in Paris after the horrific attacks on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket claimed by the Islamic State group.
Afterward, Netanyahu proclaimed, “I went to Paris not just as the prime minister of Israel but as a representative of the entire Jewish people.”
It is this conflation between Israel and Judaism, one that is baked into the foundation of Israel and perpetuated by its leaders, that leads to a problematic tautology: Israel’s leaders represent all Jewish people, and thus by definition any criticism of Israel must be criticism of all Jewish people — and hence antisemitic.
This tautology allows accusations of antisemitism to be weaponized, particularly against people who speak up about Palestinian rights — sometimes in ridiculous ways.
The fact that Greene, despite her own record, felt comfortable weaponizing antisemitism as an alleged defense of Israel while spewing antisemitic remarks shows how cynical the discourse about this heinous form of racism has become.
It’s embedded in Zionism, which, like much of European colonial thought at the time, tried to wrap itself in some kind of civilizing conquest, a moral mission, Rudyard Kipling’s “white man’s burden,” a “return” for European Jews – long discriminated against and persecuted in Europe – to raise up the “sullen peoples” already there, as Kipling might have put it.
And such morality tales need myths.
Thus, Palestine was a “land without a people, for a people without a land.”
That myth transformed in time to the idea of the uncultivated land, the greening of the desert, the bringing of new technology to a backward people, an idea that Israel is still pushing today to gullible interviewers.
But Palestine under Ottoman rule (from the 16th century to the early 20th) was a mostly agrarian society even as it was developing into a regional trading hub.
Palestinians made their living largely off the cultivated land, but also from religious pilgrims, manufacturing and trade.
To insist that this very-much-present people did nothing to the land – that there “practically were no tenants there” in the words of Israel’s prime minister-in-waiting Benjamin Netanyahu – is simply not true.
And despite massive immigration from Europe, there were more than twice as many Palestinians as there were Jews by the time the Nakba started.
It was the Nakba that ensured radical demographic change, allowing a mostly Jewish state to emerge.
But unable to concede that Israel was somehow born in sin, one of the prime objectives of today’s Israel apologists has been to try and erase this history.
The current project of Palestinian erasure is more subtle than the past’s erasure of the physical evidence – the villages and towns, the people themselves.
From attacks on the Palestinian curriculum, to the removal of archive material relating to the Nakba, the focus now is on silencing Palestinian history.
Burying the story
Would, for instance, pointing out the reality of the Nakba fall foul of the the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism, where one example is claiming that “the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavour”?
But how otherwise to explain the Nakba and its aftermath?
After all, Jewish colonists from Europe after 1917 – the vast majority – did not come to live equally with the indigenous population.
They came to claim a “national home” in Palestine as promised them by some distant British colonial overlord.
Some argue that these immigrants weren’t welcomed and hence had no choice but to fight.
But, first, why would anyone be surprised that Palestinians were not overly enthused by having tens of thousands of European migrants arriving on their shores to claim those shores for themselves?
Second, why drive the Palestinians out – more than 750,000 wound up in refugee camps in neighboring countries and territories, much more than half of the entire Palestinian population at the time – if this was not a project to replace one people with another, or, indeed, a “racist enterprise?”
Why prevent them from returning?
The 1950 law of absentee property allowed the Israeli state to confiscate what property and lands were still intact but whose owners had fled for safety, been forcibly removed or killed. International law stipulates that refugees have a right of return.
But Israel will not allow Palestinian refugees theirs.
There is no compensation offered, no acknowledgement, even, that this has happened, that these “absentees” were real.
Indeed, population transfer was always part of the Zionist equation.
Theodore Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, early advocated the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, writing in his diary that “we shall try to spirit the penniless [Arab] population across the border,” a “removal” that should be done “discretely and circumspectly.”
David Ben-Gurion, who would go on to become Israel’s first prime minister, in 1938 similarly made no bones about what he thought should happen: “I support compulsory transfer.
I do not see in it anything immoral.”
There was a Plan D – to go along with plans A, B, C – to be put into effect should the Palestinians reject the nascent UN’s 1947 partition plan.
(This rejection was widely expected.
Indeed, a British cabinet meeting from September 1948, after the fact, made it clear that it had long been commonly understood that a “separate Arab state would not be viable.”)
Plan D (Dalet) was explicit in its aims, detailing tactics for attacks on civilian populations and the destruction of villages.
Should villagers prove truculent, the plan was clear: they “must be expelled outside the borders of the state.”
In other words, the forced removal of Palestinians from their land was very much a plan, and, as Zionists saw it at the time, a necessity.
In the words of Benny Morris, an Israeli historian who first uncovered much of the documentary evidence for this ethnic cleansing in Israel’s archives: “Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here.”
A global reach
With ethnic cleansing came the massacres. Deir Yassin, Lydda, Ramle, Tantura … the list goes on. It is also well-known, not least to those who perpetrated them.
Israeli protestations about Farha are therefore either purely performative – like the French police officer in Casablanca being “shocked, shocked” at Humphrey Bogart’s gambling den while collecting his winnings – or they are testament to how successful the attempt at burying history has been, especially among Israelis and their supporters.
وثّق الفيلم الإسرائيلي «#الطنطورة» رواية #النكبة الفلسطينية على لسان جنود صهاينة عن جرائم الحرب المرتكبة خلال مجزرة #قرية_الطنطورة الفلسطينية عام 1948. ويُعتبر الفيلم توثيقاً نوعياً من قبل أطراف إسرائيلية لوقوع المجزرة، ودحضاً للرواية الإسرائيلية الرسمية. pic.twitter.com/JOTjTBZ8JU
Certainly, they are an attempt at bullying those who would tell the truth, whitewashing historic crimes in such a way that any Palestinian resistance seems entirely irrational, and Palestinians are rendered merely as Kipling’s “Half devil and half child.”
Farha is a corrective to this camera obscura perspective on the past.
And whether all details in the film are documentary fact is as relevant to the truth of the Nakba as thousands of World War II movies are to the truth of the holocaust.
You can’t understand the issue of Palestine if you don’t understand the Nakba.
And you won’t resolve anything if the Nakba and all it entailed are not properly addressed.
With its Netflix platform, Farha has unprecedented global reach.
Well told and beautifully filmed, this is a potentially groundbreaking opportunity to engender greater understanding for Palestine in far-flung places.
For that reason alone, but also because it gives form and shape to something so crucial to the Palestinian experience, Farha is hugely important. Don’t miss it.
Renewed violence has flared up between Palestine and the Zionist entity over the past few days, which has been regarded as the deadliest in years by the UN, causing multiple deaths and injuries.
Though the United Nations has previously marked 2022 as one of the deadliest years in Zionist -Palestine conflict in recent history, violence has intensified once again after a cascade of events.
Nine Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank city of Jenin on Thursday, 26 January, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said, causing the Palestinian Authority to stop coordinating with Israel on security matters.
According to data from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, this puts the total number of Palestinians killed by Israeli troops in the first month of 2023 to 30.
A day after the raid, a Palestinian shooter near a synagogue outside of Jerusalem killed seven people and injured three more.
These events come against the backdrop of the visit by Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s new terrorist Minister of National Security, to the holy sites in Jerusalem on 3 January.
The visit has been criticised by Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and Bahrain, with the majority of them labelling it “provocative.”
CIA director Bill Burns, arrived in Tel Aviv on Thursday, 26 January, to meet with with his counterparts from both sides — Zionist and Palestinian — as well as other officials.
Analysts have noted that these visits have intensified the conflict, coupled with heightened tensions since an extreme-right Zionist government took power earlier this month.
But what do we know about the conflict so far?
What sparked the increase in violence?
Last Monday, 23 January, leading Israeli officials threatened to forcibly evict at least 180 Palestinians living in the Bedouin town of Khan al-Ahmar on the eastern outskirts of Jerusalem.
In response, dozens of Palestinians protested against these threats.
Palestinian activists such as Khairy Hanoun, who was at the protest at Khan al-Ahmar, told Al Jazeera: “We came here to challenge Ben-Gvir’s decision and the decisions of all of the right-wing government.”
Ben-Gvir declared that the forcible removal of the community would proceed, and plans for a visit to the location by far-right ministers like Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich emerged.
The Israeli government claims that the town was “constructed without a permit,” but officials make building permits difficult to obtain for Palestinians in the lands referred to as Area C, which make up more than 60 percent of the occupied West Bank and include East Jerusalem.
Why are Jenin and Nablus targeted in particular?
In September of 2021, a rebel resistance group formed, naming itself the “Jenin Brigades,” in response to Israel’s plan for forced displacement of Palestinian families.
By late 2021, these resistance groups declared the Palestinian Authority’s security forces unwelcome in the Jenin refugee camp and the Old City of Nablus.
The Palestinian Authority’s security forces have been losing control over these areas over time due to its security coordination with Israel.
Israeli forces carried out a raid in the Jenin Refugee Camp in the north of the occupied West Bank on the morning of Thursday, 26 January.
At least nine Palestinians, including one elderly woman and two children, were killed by Israeli forces.
The raids are a part of a campaign Israel calls “Break the Wave” in which it targets fighters associated with armed organisations by conducting mass arrests and executions in locations like the two northern occupied West Bank cities.
The campaign aims to quell the shift towards a Palestinian armed resistance that has formed in Jenin and Nablus following a large-scale popular outburst of Palestinian resistance in May 2021.
Jerusalem Synagogue Shooting
On Friday, 27 January – a day following the raid in Jenin, the deadliest Israeli raid in years on the West Bank – a Palestinian gunman killed seven people and wounded three others near a synagogue on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
According to a statement from Israeli police, the shooter was a 21-year-old Palestinian living in East Jerusalem who appears to have carried out the shooting alone.
The action was lauded as “a response to the crime performed by the occupation in Jenin and a natural response to the occupation’s criminal deeds,” by a spokesman for the Islamist movement Hamas.
The Egyptian Foreign Ministry underlined its rejection of “any attacks that harm civilians” in a statement and emphasised its denunciation of the attack.
After the synagogue shooting attack, U.S. President Joe Biden told his national security team to help their Israeli counterparts, according to the White House.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also announced that the cabinet would meet on Saturday following the attack.
What Now?
The new far-right Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has given important roles to Israeli members of the far-right, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is now in charge of administrating the West Bank.
Smotrich has previously openly encouraged violence against Palestinians and supports the full annexation of the West Bank.
Experts have expressed that the new government will move Israel’s policies farther to the right, leading to policies of Jewish supremacy and anti-Palestinian.
In early January, for example, Ben Gvir issued a new directive directing police to strictly enforce the ban on flying Palestinian flags in public places.
There seems to be no signs of resolution or descalation of the conflict, as armed Palestinian resistance groups have been expanding in Palestinian territories.
There are already fears by experts that these tensions may boil over into a third Intifada, as Israeli officials have stepped up their operations.
Zionist occupation jail authorities assaulted Palestinian women prisoners on Tuesday morning amid a push to enforce strict new measures against Palestinian inmates introduced by Israel’s far-right Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir.
The Palestinian Prisoners’ Society said in a statement that Israeli forces beat women prisoners in Damon jail, fired tear gas at them and used pepper spray.
The Palestinian Authority’s prisoners’ affairs commission said the Zionist Prison Service (IPS) also confiscated electronic devices and some personal items from the prisoners in what it called “collective punishment”.
In response, the prisoners set some cells ablaze.
The IPS said Yasmeen Shaaban, the representative of the Palestinian women prisoners who was among those assaulted, was put in solitary confinement for attempting to set her cell on fire.
Mother’s Day: Palestinian women prisoners demand rights in Zionist jails
“The punitive actions taken in the Damon prison will have consequences in all prisons.
The situation is getting worse because of the measures taken by the fascist minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
The Israeli government bears full responsibility for the situation and its consequences,” the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society said.
The assault on women prisoners caused anger among Palestinian detainees across all Israeli jails.
The prisoners’ commission said inmates in Ofer prison refused to accept their breakfast meals amid news of the crackdown and demanded to speak with Damon prisoners on the phone.
The assault came a day after 120 Palestinians in the notorious Negev desert prison launched a hunger strike against the IPS’s recent punitive measures.
The far right minister of security says Palestinian prisoners getting fresh bread every day is an ‘absurdity’
The IPS had cut electricity in the Negev prison, barred prisoners’ families from visits, and stopped serving them meals.
Dozens of Palestinian prisoners in Ketziot, Ofer and Megiddo prisons were put in solitary confinement over the weekend, allegedly for celebrating the killing of seven Israeli settlers by a Palestinian man in a shooting in occupied East Jerusalem on Friday.
Palestinian prisoners said they will also stop agreeing to security checks by the IPS as part of their protests against the growing crackdowns.
Strike in East Jerusalem
The rise in prison tensions follows a week of violence across the occupied Palestinian territories.
Israeli forces killed 10 Palestinians in a large-scale raid on Jenin in the occupied West Bank on Thursday which sparked nationwide anger.
Jenin’s bereaved residents left in a ‘war zone’ following Israeli raid
A Palestinian man opened fire at Israeli settlers in occupied East Jerusalem on Friday, killing seven.
The shooting prompted harsh crackdowns by Israeli forces on Palestinians in East Jerusalem.
On Tuesday, residents of Jabal al-Mukaber and Sheikh Saad, towns in southern Jerusalem, staged a general strike against what they called collective punishment by Israeli authorities against them, which included threats to demolish dozens of houses.
Hundreds of Palestinian homes in Jabal al-Mukaber are threatened by Israeli demolition orders for not having building permits.
Israeli authorities make it nearly impossible for Palestinians to get building permits in the city which forces many to build without them.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Israeli demolished 666 Palestinian homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 2021, displacing 958 people, a 38 percent increase from the previous year.
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Jenin – the name is now a synonym for the brutality of the Israeli war machine, and for the heroism of the Palestinian people as they seek to defend themselves against a merciless assault.
The Israelis and their amen corner aren’t going to spin their way out of this one, and they know it.
Here’s Janine di Giovanni in the London Times:”The refugees I had interviewed in recent days while trying to enter the camp were not lying.
If anything, they underestimated the the carnage and the horror.
Rarely, in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life.”
Using civilians as human shields, the Israelis went on a rampage of vengeance and bloodlust that only ran its course when the streets of Jenin were running with blood – not only the gore of fighters, as the Israelis are now claiming, but that of innocent civilians wantonly murdered.
Here’s Marie Colvin, of the Times, tracking down the horrific truth.
Apparently, she had only to – literally – follow her nose:
“The first medical teams allowed into the Jenin refugee camp last week followed the chickens.
Human senses were overwhelmed by the devastation and the stench of death, but the birds were not distracted.
They were hungry. Two rusty-colored fowl pecking away at a bundle in the street drew a Red Cross team to the remains of Jamal Sabagh.
“He wasn’t really recognizable to an untrained eye. His body had been lying there for more than a week.
The Israeli army had banned ambulances from the camp for 11 days, and neighbors were too terrified to go to him.”
“Tank tracks led to his body, over it and onwards through the mud. What had once been a young man was rotting flesh mingled with shredded clothing, mashed into the earth.
One foot was all that looked human.”
THE HOMICIDE OFFENSIVE
Oh, can’t you just hear Bill Bennett and his fellow Israel Firsters trying to justify this atrocity?
After all, Sabagh was a terrorist, a potential suicide bomber, a fanatic bent on the destruction of Israel, and was killed in the course of what the IDF calls a “battle.”
Except that Sabagh wasn’t a fighter.
A diabetic too ill to flee, he was also fearful that he might be mistaken for a fighter if he left his house. So he stayed – definitely a mistake:
“Two days later, he left his house when the Israelis yelled over megaphones that they were going to blow it up.
He walked, directed by soldiers in armoured personnel carriers, with other men to Seha Street at the centre of the camp, carrying his bag of medicines.
He joined the crowd. Soldiers yelled at him to take off his shirt, then his trousers.
He clung to his bag of medicine as he tried to unbuckle his belt, and he was slow.
The soldiers shot him, friends say.”
The editorially pro-Israel Telegraph was equally damning, with one story headlined “Horror Stories from the Siege of Jenin.”
Summary executions, including the murder of young children, vicious beatings of women, and a complete disregard for the elementary rules of war, marks the Israelis’ “Operation Defensive Shield” – what a name! – as the devilish work of homicidal maniacs.
Why else would the IDF have bulldozed houses, without warning, while whole families were still in them?
This was the Homicide Offensive, meant to deliver a death blow to the Palestinian nation.
But swiftly burying the bodies under tons of rubble wasn’t deep enough: as Nahum Barnea, whom the Telegraph describes as Israel’s leading newspaper commentator, put it:
“If Israel does not find some way to give them a dignified burial, the bodies will bury Israel.”
SUDETEN PALESTINE
Barnea recognizes that the main front in the war for a Greater Israel is not on the West Bank, but in the West Wing – and in the West generally.
In the propaganda war for the hearts and minds of their American patrons – without whom Israel would not last a year – the Sharon government is conducting a desperate struggle to suppress the truth not only about Jenin, but about their own annexationist agenda.
“Operation Defensive Shield,” eh? Now comes the news that Sharon plans to absorb half the West Bank into Israel proper.
The Israeli blitzkrieg was about as “defensive” as Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in the dark days prior to World War II – and just as ominous.
HILLARY JOINS THE VRWC
For weeks, the pro-Israel lobby in the US has been on the offensive, mirroring the IDF’s scorched earth tactics with a take-no-prisoners propaganda blitz.
Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu led the charge up Capitol Hill, with the usual array of sniper pundits giving him plenty of cover.
Bob Novak archly remarked that Bibi’s trip seemed to be an electioneering jaunt – perhaps to get his old job back – but left tantalizingly open the question of which election in which country.
In a dress rehearsal for the key Florida election, putative presidential candidate Joe Lieberman and the Democrats competed with right-wing Republicans to see who could roll out the red carpet faster.
The Los Angeles Times pointed to the emergence of a Lieberman-Hillary Clinton-conservative Republican alliance in Congress giving unconditional support to Israel – surely the ugliest marriage of convenience since the Hitler-Stalin Pact.
Hillary joins the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy – or is it the other way around?
At any rate, who woulda thought it would come to this? – the conservatives and the Clintonistas, together at last.
THE VULTURE BRAYS
As the story of Jenin unfolded, the Israeli disinformation campaign went into high gear, with an op-ed by Netanyahu in the War Street Journal that would win an Academy Award if ever they gave one for rank hypocrisy.
As the stench of the bodies rises up from the rubble of Jenin, this vulture brays that the root cause of terrorism is not “the deprivation of rights” – after all, Gandhi didn’t resort to suicide bombings to free India from British rule – but totalitarianism:
“Those who fight as terrorists rule as terrorists.
People who deliberately target the innocent never become leaders who protect freedom and human rights.
When terrorists seize power, they invariably set up the darkest of dictatorships–whether in Iraq, Iran,Afghanistan or Arafatistan.
In short, the reason why some resort to terror and others do not is not any absence of rights, but the presence of a tyrannical mindset.”
Israel, as we are continually reminded, is a “democracy,” but so was South Africa under the Boers. And remember, we aren’t talking about Israel proper anymore, but about Sharonistan – the Jewish state plus the annexed territories. Israel may have started out as a liberal democracy, but can a Greater Israel remain one? Contra Bibi, people who deliberately target the innocent have become the leaders of the Israeli state – so can we now confidently predict “the darkest of dictatorships” as Israel’s future?
LOST IN THE ORIENT
My good friend Emmanuel Goldstein, writing in his really quite excellent blog, Airstrip One, has a very interesting theory that impacts on this issue: he thinks Israel has been Orientalized by the influx of Sephardic (largely Arab) and Russian immigrants, and asks “are we expecting too much of Israel?” “Until recently,” he writes,
“I’ve always rooted for Israel. So why do I get so upset when they flood the airwaves with porn?
Well perhaps because I see them as being Westernized. The same reason that I support them is the same reason I expect such high standards.”
But with Jenin, something seems to have happened to the Western idealism that motivated the original Zionist movement, the souring of a once sweet wine that no amount of sugar can mask.
Goldstein, I think correctly, points to the Orientalist mindset of more recent immigrants, with their higher birthrate, as the future of Israel:
“So what are the cultural implications of this?
Well it is orientalizing Israel.
Whereas the predominantly Ashkenasi Zionist movement was heavily influenced by the ideas sweeping around Western Europe because of the years spent in or near Western Europe – what is the likely outcome of a longer immersion in Arab culture for the Sephardic Jews?
“So is this hand wringing all misplaced.
Is Israel simply orientalizing, or to be more accurate Arabising?
As anyone who followed the Lebanese civil war – and the behaviour of the Phalangists – knows, it is not enough to look to the West to act Western….Maybe what we are seeing is that Israel is becoming a foreign country to us.”
An Israeli island in the sea of Araby has been inundated and conquered, culturally and spiritually, if not yet demographically. That is the significance of Jenin, and of all the Jenins to come.
DEPT. OF SELF-PROMOTION
My regular readers will remember that I alerted you to the forthcoming publication of an anthology containing one of my past columns, and now I can report that Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in American Foreign Policy (second edition), is out – and I am jazzed.
Not just for reasons of egoboo – although there is some of that – but because it turns out this is a textbook, presented in a “Crossfire”-style debate format, intended for college and advanced high school students.
That, of course, is precisely where Antiwar.com needs to be: in the classrooms, where tomorrow’s leaders and voters are learning about the vital foreign policy issues of our time.
By the way, my own contribution is not the only reason to buy this little volume: Gee, I can’t wait to read chapter 17, which deals with the question: “Did US Military Action Against Yugoslavia Violate Just War Theory?”
Defending the rape of the former Yugoslavia is none other than Bill Clinton, but even more intriguing is the opposing piece by Marine lieutenant colonel William T. DeCamp III, whose article, arguing in the affirmative, was first published in the Marine Corps Gazette!
The book seems to be doing well, so far: Amazon says they have only three left in stock, but more are on the way.
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.
Evidence that came to light after Israel removed its gag order on information regarding the June 12 kidnapping and murder of three Jewish Israeli students suggests that it was an Israeli government operation that was intentionally used to punish Hamas and break up the new Palestinian unity government.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had immediately accused Hamas of the kidnapping — without presenting any evidence — and proceeded to “conduct a search” throughout the entirety of the West Bank until the bodies were reportedly found on June 30th.
The “search” entailed arresting and beating up about 600 Hamas members (including legislators) and trashing about 2100 homes; Israeli forces killed at least 7 Palestinians.
Israel also heightened its daily air strikes on the Gaza Strip, which has been under the Israeli blockade since Sept. 2006.
The Gaza government appealed to the UN for relief, which responded by condemning the kidnappings rather than the massive abuse of the Palestinian population. And then urging “all parties” to show restraint.
On July 1, Israel removed a gag order on information about the kidnapping that revealed shocking facts:
The Israeli government had informed members of the press around June 15th that it was aware that the students had been killed (1) but placed a gag order on that information: the government must thus have known where the bodies were. The brutal “search” was merely cover for punishment of members of Hamas, the democratically-elected party of Palestinians throughout the occupied territories. The Israeli media played along with the pretext for the abuse.
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were only called in 8-9 hours after the first call to report the kidnapping.One of the students placed a call to the police emergency hotline 10 minutes after they accepted a hitchhiking ride home, with the message that he was being kidnapped. The statement was followed by what sounded like several gunshots, groans and silence; the call lasted for 49 seconds. Police ignored the call. The teen’s father called police 5 hours later, at 3:30 am, to report his son missing. “Several hours” after that, after an exchange of 54 phone calls, the IDF and Shin Bet finally became involved. (2)
Despite possession of all of the evidence of the kidnappings and murders, the Israeli government has offered no evidence that indicates responsibilityfor the acts. Those with any direct connection to the phone calls or the finding of the bodies have remained unidentified.
Prime Minister Netanyahu has used this event for huge political gain:
to create divisions within the new “unity government” of Fatah and Hamas,
to physically punish Hamas members and the cause of Palestinian resistance,
to get legislation passed through the Knesset to block the return of East Jerusalem to Palestinians (1),
to try to foment a third intifada to legitimate further attacks on Palestinians (1) and
to whip up such hatred of Palestinians that it has become dangerous for them to be seen on Israeli streets.
The Israeli government is continuing to harass and attack Palestinians until it supposedly finds the killers.
The two young Hebron men named as the accused have been missing since June 12th.
The uncovering of this deception should arouse world condemnation.
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.
Israelis need to wake up and learn the facts about their Khazarian blood heritage and the fact that the latest peer-reviewed Johns Hopkins genetic study shows that: about 97.5% have absolutely no ancient Hebrew blood at all, are not Semites, their Khazarian ancestors converted to a perverted form of Judaism under King Bulan in about 750 AD, and thus they have no ancient right to any of Palestinian land; while 80%+ of the Palestinians are true Semites because they carry ancient Hebrew Blood and these Semites do have an ancestral right to all of Palestine.
The new nation-state of Israel was illegally set up after WWII by World Zionists who hijacked it in 1815.
The Rothschild World Zionist Money-changers were able to hijack by deploying a very crafty covert op using the fake news that Napoleon had won at Waterloo, when he was actually defeated.
This fake news sent by carrier pigeon was released early before true reports were received of Napoleon’s defeat.
This allowed Nathan Rothschild to collapse the British markets and buy up and gain control of most business and banking at a fraction of their value.
The stated reason these British based World Zionist Kingpins seized Palestinian lands illegally and gave it to these Judaics was to compensate for the Nazi Work Camps and persecution of Judaics in Europe.
Giving the Judaics back their falsely claimed homeland in Palestine was proposed as an equitable compensation for these persecuted Judaics, almost all of whom were actually Khazarians in the first place.
This whole strategy was, of course, conceived of and actuated by the World Zionists.
The real reasons these World Zionists mandated a small part of Palestine to be seized and gifted to these displaced European Khazarians turned out to be something far more sinister than helping their so-called fellow “displaced, persecuted and victimized” Judaics.
The roundup and placement of Judaics in Work Camps by Nazis provided a golden opportunity for the World Zionists (WZs) to mind-kontrol these displaced Khazarian Judaics into falsely believing they deserved to have Palestine.
The false-narrative presented to do this was that “this is where you came from in the first place”.
This claim turns out to be one of the biggest lies ever told and has caused the genocide and mass suffering of millions of Palestinians who have had their ancestral lands stolen from them by World Zionists and “given” to Khazarian to call their own Biblical land.
And we know now that this claim was an obvious falsity because recent peer-reviewed Johns Hopkins genetic research has shown that 97.5% of these Judaics living in Israel actually have no ancient Hebrew Blood at all, none.
This false claim that these persecuted European Judaics of WWII had ancient ancestral rights to Palestine was, of course, a stupendous Big Lie.
It was a very effective means to mind-kontrol these displaced Khazarians, fool them, and to use them to create a none-existent new race called “Jews”.
This false claim was an effective means to Mind-kontrol Khazarian Judaics whose bloodlines originated in King Bulan’s Khazaria and transformed them into a new protected race called “Jews”.
And this new racial designation “Jew” could be used to make them believe they were a special race, God’s chosen ones, the ancient Hebrews when all they shared was a conversion to Judaism not based on any ancient genetic bloodlines.
This World Zionist “con job” of the new racial designation “Jew” was very effective in Mind-kontrolling these Khazarians into believing that they deserved special protection for all future time from any criticism.
The World Zionists (WZs) successfully convinced these persecuted Khazarians that they had already suffered as a people far too much in WWII.
So when they would be later used as highly placed cutouts and tools for the World Zionists to fulfill their secret evil NWO agenda to destroy all societies, no criticism would be allowed.
And the WZs would make sure that the top positions in government and very lucrative business opportunities would be offered to them first as members of this new artificial racial tribe that Khazarian King Bulan had labeled as “Jews”.
Certain selected leaders of this new racial tribe would thus become handsomely rewarded as they became initiated into the secret Babylonian Talmudic system of Money-Magick and Baal worship.
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The concept Antisemitism as sophisticated WZ Mind-kontrol and the perfect defense against any criticism from “Goyim”.
Thus the WZs created the concept “Antisemitism” was to shield these Khazarians who now called themselves “Jews” from any criticism or prosecution for any of their crimes, tyranny or oppression of others such as continued land theft of Palestinian land, blockading and genocide of Palestinians and the mass-murder and suffering of 9-11-01 and all their wars.
Of course, this defense has now been shown to be nonsense for Judaics since almost all are Khazarians. But this has been claimed as Judaics’ main defense for Israel tyranny and genocide of Palestinians and theft of their land.
Anyone who has studied mind-kontrol technology in detail knows that in classic MK-Ultra (satanic or occult Babylonian Talmudic) the first step in to render the subject in a state of shock using major blood trauma, severe suffering with no escape.
This step places subjects in a very suggestible state so they will easily be conditioned by the master controller. This process can be done to large groups at once by any government or rogue group.
The photo of Russian-born David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and defense minister, and his wife is from the first Israel Defense Forces parade in July 1948.
Mind-kontrol is the reason of course that the False Flag of 9-11-01 was used by World Zionists to place the American People in a state of Blood Shock.
This made them intensely suggestible and ready to be mass hypnotized by the USG that a foreign war on Terror in the Mideast being secretly waged for WZs costing Trillions of US Dollars and thousands of American soldiers’ lives and futures was necessary.
Of course, all such mass hypnosis is always predicated on a Big Lies, false-narratives, and government propaganda.
No matter how big the lie, the American masses can be effectively mind-kontrolled to believe them if they are repeatedly broadcast and published by all of the “big six” Major Mass Media which actually serve as WZ mouthpieces.
For 9-11-01, the World Zionist-controlled Major Mass Media quickly declared that Osama bin Laden did it on behalf of Afghanistan and unless we declared an international war on terror and stopped it over there in the Mideast at its origin, much more and even worse attacks from these crazy Islamics were sure to come to America.
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How post-WW2 Israel was created using lands stolen from Palestinians.
The British Rothschilds arranged for the Balfour Declaration and later moved these European Judaics (most actually were Khazarians) to a small part of Palestine that England illegally seized from Palestinians.
The Judaics were supposed to stay in a small designated land area, but quickly formed terrorists groups to murder Palestinians and steal more land. The British peace-keepers were blown up in their hotel and driven out by these Judaic terror groups.
The World Zionist leaders that ran this new illegal nation-state comprised of stolen Palestinian ancestral lands name it “Israel” like the ancient 12 tribes of Hebrews were called.
This was done to keep these Khazarian settlers fooled into believing this Big Lie that they were of ancient Hebrew Blood and were a racially pure nation-state. Note that in the Torah Israel referred to the Twelve Hebrew Tribes as Israel, not a country.
The World Zionists who are actually secret followers of Babylonian Talmudism are best defined as Satanists and occult masters of the Black Magick, Money Magick, and the Black Arts of ancient Babylon.
These Babylonian Talmudics (BTs) are a very crafty bunch and some have claimed to be anointed by Satan who they claim is the ruler of this world and is now rising to dethrone and become God Almighty himself.
Other BT’s believe that Satan (Lucifer) actually is God Almighty now and empowers those that are chosen by him, and willing to give him their souls in exchange for extreme power, riches, and status and are also willing to break all societal norms laws when necessary to serve Satan’s will.
The term “Jew” was actually first used in Khazaria in about 750 AD after King Bulan selected Judaism as Khazaria’s national religion.
Before that those that were believers in Judaism in Palestine were called Hebrews. After 750, most Hebrews were seduced into calling themselves “Jews” along with the much larger number of Khazarians (aka Ashkenazis). It is important to note that the Tribe of Judah was only one of the Twelve Hebrew Tribes and Khazarians have no blood relation to any of these tribes including the Tribe of Judah.
The history of the Hebrew Tribes after they gained their Promised Land is complex. Basically the Ten Tribes split from two tribes.
Some true Hebrew (non-Khazarian) Torah scholars believe that God Almighty divorced himself from the Twelve Hebrew Tribes and removed his gift of the promised land to them for their continued unrepentant idolatry.
Most of these true Hebrew Torah scholars do not believe that the new nation of Israel has any right to exist in Palestine and blame it all on WZs for setting this great lie up in the first place.
These particular Hebrew Torah scholars are dead set against World Zionism and all its evil works.
World Zionists (BTs) set up various rules to define this new artificial race (“Jew”) that they created in Khazaria in 750 AD and falsely claimed it came from ancient Hebrew Bloodlines. BTs defined what a real “Jew” was, including one must have a “Jewish” mother. It didn’t matter if the father was Jewish. This was done to protect any Jewish philandering males from blow-back due to fathering an illegitimate child from a Goyim woman.
The WZs convinced (mind-kontrolled) these displaced European Judaics of WWII that they were from ancient Hebrew Bloodlines when they were actually from Khazarian bloodlines from ancient Khazaria.
Khazarians have sometimes been called Askenazis. This was the first step in creating this new artificial race of Jews and a new racially pure nation based on this Big Lie.
Khazarian King Bulan ordered his people to accept his choice of new national religion which was actually a perverted form of Judaism based on Babylonian Talmudism in about 750 AD.
Fortunately, most Khazarians are secular and do not practice the Babylonian Talmudism that characterized the form of Judaism King Bulan accepted and practiced.
The WZs desired to set up Israel as a nation of Fake Hebrews (Revelation 2:9 and 3:9) to serve as their key action-agents and also as a world sanctuary and base of operations for the Rothschild Khazarian Mafia (RKM).
The mass deaths of Judaics in WWII and the Nazi Work Camps was then used by the WZs (BTs) to create this new mass role of victim for Judaics. Judaics were thus transformed forever into a special class of the persecuted that the whole world must defer to and protect forever.
“Never Again” became the Judaic motto. No criticism in any form would be allowed and this would be labeled as a new social offense called “Antisemitism”. This new worldwide standard for protecting this new synthetically created racial tribe of “Jews” from any criticism or further persecution became law in many nations, especially in Canada and Europe due to WZ money power and purchased political influence.
The bottom line to all this is that the WZ creation of this synthetic new Tribal race called “Jews” provided great cover for WZs who were committed to: secretly practicing (without discovery) Babylonian Talmudism (Satanism) with child and human sacrifice; anti-human pernicious usury-based Money-Magick; and destroying every society on Planet Earth in order to create their Satanic NWO system.
The problem is that since 97.5% of these Judaics living in Israel are Khazarian blood (not Hebrew blood) like most living in America.
It’s a sad fact that the WZs who created private Fiat pernicious usury central banking has appointed Khazarians as well paid cutouts to sell their nations out and run these WZ central banking systems.
These Cutouts are usually Khazarians who wrongly refer to themselves as Jews.
To prevent any discussion or mass protests against the WZ hijacking and Bankster abuse of America by Khazarian Cutouts, Antisemitism has been fully utilized.
Although any reasonable person knows that not all Khazarians are bad people, but certainly the evidence now available suggests that all WZs who are BTs are Satanists and by definition, anti-society, anti-human, sociopathic and pro-mass-death for their own gain.
And that all Khazarians who serve as highly paid WZ Cutouts are habitual violators of the US Constitution and numerous US Law including RICO which are major felonies.
The Rothschild Khazarian Mafia (RKM) is the core group of Babylonian Talmudics running this new and illegal racist nation of Israel.
The RKM is also known as the World Money Changers and runs the Satanic Pedophile Network. They are also the World Zionists.
Rothschild Khazarian Mafia (RKM) Money Power provides the muscle for World Zionism.
Creating and controlling most of the world’s money has provided a lot of continuing power and that is what these World Zionist do by issuing debt-notes no longer backed by any real commodities, gold or silver.
These WZ/BT World Moneychangers lend these debt notes (which are required by law to be accepted as “legal tender”) to the masses and charge pernicious usury (illegal under the Torah Law itself).
Obviously money should be owned by any nations own citizens in the first place, should be real, and no interest should be charged for using it, especially for these fake money debt-notes.
Obviously this RKM money-power Fiat central private banking system is the biggest scam in history.
It has enabled the World Zionists to infiltrate and hijack many nations such as America and then use them to stage wars to make massive profits.
WZ money power is now in the process of being displaced by nations grouping together such as the BRICS.
It makes take several years or it makes happen anytime overnight, but the RKM private Fiat central Banking system and the US Petrodollar, its illegitimate child, are going down for the count.
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The post-WWII creation of the nation-state of Israel was based on a colossal lie and major land theft and genocide against the Palestinian People.
Yes, the post-WWII nation-state of Israel was created on one of the greatest lies ever told and is nothing more than high-level land theft by the world’s largest organized crime Syndicate, the Rothschild Khazarian Mafia (RKM).
And this RKM are hardcore World Zionists who take their orders from a small secret satanic group the top Babylonian Talmudics (BTs).
Top BTs have claimed to be directly powered by pure satanic and demonic powers and each has their own personal demon consigliere appear to them if they continue to promote and cause enough blood sacrifice and human suffering.
This claim that Judaics had an ancestral right to Palestine due to their genetics was, of course, a monstrous lie.
We now know for certain the vast majority (over 90%) these persecuted Judaics that survived this WWII European persecution carried no ancient Hebrew blood at all and were Khazarians (sometimes called Ashkenazim) from the area that is now called the Ukraine.
Most of these World Zionists, aka the Rothschild Khazarian Mafia, carry no Hebrew Blood either and typically answer to the top Old Black European nobility Families.
These Old Black European families that started and run World Zionism carry inter-generational satanism and practice secret occult black magick, trauma-based mind-kontrol, and numerous secret black arts.
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World Zionists used the RKM to hijack America in 1913.
The World Zionists used the RKM to infiltrate and hijack America in 1913 by bribing members of the US Congress and the President to pass the illegal, clearly unconstitutional Federal Reserve Act in 1913.
Once these RKM had gained control over the creation and distribution of US money with no oversight or auditing ever, they could issue and print all the money they wanted as unbacked debt-notes and buy up, bribe or human compromise almost every single member of Congress and even most presidents.
Those they couldn’t they isolated, drove out of the office or if they deemed necessary arranged for their murder.
What have been the results of the hijacking of America by the World Zionists (WZs) in 1913 by the illegal and unconstitutional passage of the RKM’s Federal Reserve Act?
America became another World Zionist occupied nation-state just like England, France, Post WWII Germany, and so many others.
Once the WZs had control over the US Congress then they began to use America as their military and economic enforcer all over the world for their corporate partners.
This was explicated by General Smedley Butler in his famous book, War is a Racket. General Butler was the most decorated US Marine ever and was awarded two Medals of Honor for bravery in combat.
The sad secret is that most of the world central banks have been controlled by the WZs through their action-agent Cutouts the Rothschild Khazarian Mafia (RKM). Any nation-state which tried to eject the RKM central banks or the US Petro Dollar becomes an immediate target for civil war, revolution or destruction by war using completely fabricated fake reasons.
This is done by deploying the Military enforcers which include the US Military, NATO members militaries and private mercenary armies like the CIA’s and many others including ISIS, Daesh, el Nusra, etc.
Israel become the WZ organized crime central.
Israel has become the world capital of the Rothschild Khazarian Mafia (RKM) only because it has been mandated by the World Zionists. This has transformed Israel into the world capital for sexual perversion, kidnapping for sex trafficking, murder for organ trafficking, and high-level financial crimes.
Recently the RKM has been ripping off their own fellow Israelis and many Israelis have had enough. Various Israel citizen groups are now working to get Netanyahu out of the office and to see that their laws for financial crimes are enforced.
There is a now a big split forming in Israeli politics. A significant number of Israelis are getting fed up with the corruption and with the persecution of Palestinians as well as and the continuing theft of more and more of their land.
Foreign based espionage groups in America have been deployed by the WZs.
All these foreign-based espionage groups in America that are now trying to create chaos like the ADL and SPLC are pretending to support minorities. And they have been set up, funded and deployed by the WZs through Cutouts and Mind-kontrolled stooges.
They do this in order to create a cover for themselves because once the average American finds out what they are doing to undermine America, they will demand that they become registered as foreign agents and even prosecuted under existing espionage laws.
When these Khazarians pretend to care for (and represent minorities) and create false-narratives of bigotry, persecution and racism, this provides a great hiding place for these Khazarians.
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Conclusion.
Most of the Judaics in America and Israel who call themselves “Jewish” are actually Khazarians and carry no Hebrew Blood at all. Therefore they are not real Semites compared to 80%+ of the Palestinians that do actually carry ancient Hebrew blood and are true Semites.
This hard reality means that these Khazarians pretending to be Hebrews can no longer legitimately plead Antisemitism when folks criticize them for their espionage against America.
The best antidote to the very crafty mind-kontrol of the World Zionists that is based on the lie that Khazarians are from ancient Hebrew blood is a frank declaration of the truth that 97.5% of Israelis who call themselves Jewish actually have no Hebrew blood at all.
Truth is the best immunization against the massive satanic two-faced lies of the WZs and their chief action agents the Rothschild Khazarian Mafia (RKM). And we now know that the RKM is the world’s largest organized crime syndicate because it is fully empowered by the World Zionist Banksters who are Babylonian Talmudics.
Israelis have been deeply mind-kontrolled by the World Zionists to believe a very big lie that they carry ancient Hebrew Blood and have an ancestral right to Palestine when they have none. They have been set up to create conflict in the Mideast to prime the war machine pump for vast RKM Bankster profits.
But insiders know that unless Israelis wake up and began to understand how the WZs have played them, they will eventually be over-run by the rest of the world, one way or another. Israelis have been highly rewarded with America taxpayer dollars by the WZs for doing their will, but they, in reality, are disposable Cutouts, just the way many of their relatives were who were kidnapped and placed in Nazi work camps upon the orders of the WZs who set up both Nazism and Communism in the first place.
Just for the records, I am not an Anti-Semite. I love the Palestinians people and other true Semites. Actually I am not even anti-Khazarian but I am against how they have been mind-kontrolled and used by World Zionists to serve as Cutouts and do their dirty work. I am not even anti-Jew, but I think they need to be exposed for being mind-kontrolled Khazarians.
Sadly most Jews do not even know that they are actually of Khazarian bloodlines which are a combination of Turk and Mongol whose true ancestors converted to Judaism in Khazaria under King Bulan.
As a tribe, those calling themselves Jews have been kicked out of over 100 nations for some of the unsocial acts of their leaders who were empowered by RKM Fiat central Banking and have now been exposed for being responsible for the attack on America on 9-11-01.
Thus many who have learned of how some top Khazarians willingly did the dirty work for the WZs, now have an intense dislike for “Jews” in general. The Jewish leaders (PNACers, top NeoCons, Israeli-America “Israeli-first” Dual Citizens) attempt to ward off this criticism and blame by claiming it is nothing but Antisemitism.
Actually, to be accurate, this anger and desire for justice to be leveled against the perps who did 9-11-01 could be called anti-Khazarianism and is well justified for all the illegal unconstitutional wars and associated mass-death, woundings, disabilities and mass-suffering it has brought about.
Its a fact that strong factions deep inside the Secret Shadow Government (SSG), the Secret Space War Program (SSWP), and the Pentagon now understand that it was the WZs, the Khazarian, the Dual Citizens and their lackeys who did 9-11-01.
This has produced a deep and growing split between true American Patriots and Khazarians in power and these Khazarians are being pushed aside and losing their power by the day.
The whole world is now organizing together to displace the World Zionists and their Khazarians Cutouts out of power.
It will take some time, but now that so many inside the SSG, the SSWP and the Pentagon know the truth that 9-11-01 was actually an attack on America by the World Zionists, they are beginning to take covert actions against the WZs and their Khazarian Cutouts and their lackeys.
Israelis need to wake up and learn the facts about their Khazarian blood heritage and the fact that the latest peer-reviewed Johns Hopkins genetic study shows that: about 97.5% have absolutely no ancient Hebrew blood at all, are not Semites, their Khazarian ancestors converted to a perverted form of Judaism under King Bulan in about 750 AD, and thus they have no ancient right to any of Palestinian land; while 80%+ of the Palestinians are true Semites because they carry ancient Hebrew Blood and these Semites do have an ancestral right to all of Palestine.
American Jews need to wake up soon too before they allow the WZ to destroy America, the goose that is laying their golden eggs of very high positions and high pay because they are part of the new synthetic tribe of “Jews” and have been used by WZs as their disposal Cutouts. When the great Federal Reserve System reaches its limits like any Ponzi scheme always done (and this may be quite soon), the Cutouts will always receive the blame while the WZ occult masters slip away.
Every day, more and more Americans and folks around the world are learning that the WZs used Khazarians to run the attack on America on 9-11-01 to motivate Americans to deploy their soldiers as disposable cannon fodder for the WZ’s Mideast wars of aggression, acquisition, and profit. And that these wars have produced millions of dead, wounded, disabled and displaced civilians.
ISIS et all, the private Israeli/CIA/Saudi mercenary army, has now been defeated by the Syrian military and Russian precision air power.
It won’t be long now until most nations of the world, especially Mideast nations gang up, Lebanize and Balkanize Israel. At that point, it sure seems that the USA will be too weak economically to defend Israel for the WZs.
And as oil prices continue to fall, Saudi Arabia’s days serving as a primary war and terror financing tool for the WZs are now limited.
The promising news is that there is now a growing number of actual Torah Jews, True Hebrews, and even a growing number of Khazarians around the world that understand Zionism and all the evil it produces. These folks now want to give the Israeli settlements back to the Palestinians, establish Palestine as a nation and push the crazy Likudists out of power in Israel.
A surprising number of young college-aged Khazarians actually support the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement (BDS) against Israel.
Every day more and more folks understand the evil that these WZ Babylonian Talmudic Baal worshiping Satanist do and have been getting away with.
Full exposure of all the evil done by these Satan worshiping WZs is now a certainty and no longer just a wish, thanks to the Internet, the World’s New Gutenberg Press.
So when you hear the term “Jew” used, think Khazarian synthetic racial tribe that is actually comprised of Khazarian converts to Judaism. Think Turk and Mongol bloodlines and no direct ancestry to ancient Hebrews or Palestine. And remember that about 97.5% of these folks that call themselves Jewish carry no ancient Hebrew blood at all and are thus not Semites.
And do not fall for their artificially created defense of Antisemitism for any criticism since it only applies to true Semites and not them, folks like the Palestinians and small remnants of the original Twelve Hebrew Tribes which were scattered around the world after diaspora with most interbreeding with other bloodlines.
It is important for Khazarians to realize they have been mind-kontrolled by the WZs and many of their relatives suffered persecution in WWII at the direction of the WZs who made money off the work camps where their relatives manufactured war materials for the Nazis.
When Israel becomes blamed for 9-11-01 and the Khazarian staffed Federal Reserve System fails, Khazarians will likely be blamed and persecuted once again unless they wake up now. And as always, the WZs slip away and their highly paid Khazarian Cutouts get blamed.
5 Jul 2019 – Since early last decade, Defense Ministry teams have scoured local archives and removed troves of historic documents to conceal proof of the Nakba.
Four years ago, historian Tamar Novick was jolted by a document she found in the file of Yosef Vashitz, from the Arab Department of the left-wing Mapam Party, in the Yad Yaari archive at Givat Haviva.
The document, which seemed to describe events that took place during the 1948 war, began:
“Safsaf [former Palestinian village near Safed] – 52 men were caught, tied them to one another, dug a pit and shot them. 10 were still twitching.
Women came, begged for mercy. Found bodies of 6 elderly men. There were 61 bodies. 3 cases of rape, one east of from Safed, girl of 14, 4 men shot and killed. From one they cut off his fingers with a knife to take the ring.”
The writer goes on to describe additional massacres, looting and abuse perpetrated by Israeli forces in Israel’s War of Independence.
“There’s no name on the document and it’s not clear who’s behind it,” Dr. Novick tells Haaretz.
“It also breaks off in the middle. I found it very disturbing.
I knew that finding a document like this made me responsible for clarifying what happened.”
The Upper Galilee village of Safsaf was captured by the Israel Defense Forces in Operation Hiram toward the end of 1948.
Safsaf-Safad: Zionist gangs attacking Safsaf village just before the massacre(Oct 31st 1948
Moshav Safsufa was established on its ruins.
Allegations were made over the years that the Seventh Brigade committed war crimes in the village.
Those charges are supported by the document Novick found, which was not previously known to scholars.
It could also constitute additional evidence that the Israeli top brass knew about what was going on in real time.
Novick decided to consult with other historians about the document.
Benny Morris, whose books are basic texts in the study of the Nakba – the “calamity,” as the Palestinians refer to the mass emigration of Arabs from the country during the 1948 war – told her that he, too, had come across similar documentation in the past.
He was referring to notes made by Mapam Central Committee member Aharon Cohen on the basis of a briefing given in November 1948 by Israel Galili, the former chief of staff of the Haganah militia, which became the IDF.
Cohen’s notes in this instance, which Morris published, stated: “Safsaf 52 men tied with a rope.
Dropped into a pit and shot. 10 were killed. Women pleaded for mercy. [There were] 3 cases of rape. Caught and released.
A girl of 14 was raped. Another 4 were killed. Rings of knives.”
Morris’ footnote (in his seminal “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949”) states that this document was also found in the Yad Yaari Archive.
But when Novick returned to examine the document, she was surprised to discover that it was no longer there.
Palestine refugees initially displaced to Gaza board boats to Lebanon or Egypt, in 1949. Hrant Nakashian/1949 UN Archives
“At first I thought that maybe Morris hadn’t been accurate in his footnote, that perhaps he had made a mistake,” Novick recalls.
“It took me time to consider the possibility that the document had simply disappeared.”
When she asked those in charge where the document was, she was told that it had been placed behind lock and key at Yad Yaari – by order of the Ministry of Defense.
Since the start of the last decade, Defense Ministry teams have been scouring Israel’s archives and removing historic documents.
But it’s not just papers relating to Israel’s nuclear project or to the country’s foreign relations that are being transferred to vaults: Hundreds of documents have been concealed as part of a systematic effort to hide evidence of the Nakba.
The phenomenon was first detected by the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research.
According to a report drawn up by the institute, the operation is being spearheaded by Malmab, the Defense Ministry’s secretive security department (the name is a Hebrew acronym for “director of security of the defense establishment”), whose activities and budget are classified.
The report asserts that Malmab removed historical documentation illegally and with no authority, and at least in some cases has sealed documents that had previously been cleared for publication by the military censor.
Some of the documents that were placed in vaults had already been published.
An investigative report by Haaretz found that Malmab has concealed testimony from IDF generals about the killing of civilians and the demolition of villages, as well as documentation of the expulsion of Bedouin during the first decade of statehood.
Conversations conducted by Haaretz with directors of public and private archives alike revealed that staff of the security department had treated the archives as their property, in some cases threatening the directors themselves.
Yehiel Horev, who headed Malmab for two decades, until 2007, acknowledged to Haaretz that he launched the project, which is still ongoing.
He maintains that it makes sense to conceal the events of 1948, because uncovering them could generate unrest among the country’s Arab population.
Asked what the point is of removing documents that have already been published, he explained that the objective is to undermine the credibility of studies about the history of the refugee problem.
In Horev’s view, an allegation made by a researcher that’s backed up by an original document is not the same as an allegation that cannot be proved or refuted.
The document Novick was looking for might have reinforced Morris’ work.
During the investigation, Haaretz was in fact able to find the Aharon Cohen memo, which sums up a meeting of Mapam’s Political Committee on the subject of massacres and expulsions in 1948.
Participants in the meeting called for cooperation with a commission of inquiry that would investigate the events.
One case the committee discussed concerned “grave actions” carried out in the village of Al-Dawayima, east of Kiryat Gat.
One participant mentioned the then-disbanded Lehi underground militia in this connection.
Acts of looting were also reported: “Lod and Ramle, Be’er Sheva, there isn’t [an Arab] store that hasn’t been broken into.
9th Brigade says 7, 7th Brigade says 8.”
“The party,” the document states near the end, “is against expulsion if there is no military necessity for it.
There are different approaches concerning the evaluation of necessity.
And further clarification is best.
What happened in Galilee – those are Nazi acts!
Every one of our members must report what he knows.”
The Israeli version
One of the most fascinating documents about the origin of the Palestinian refugee problem was written by an officer in Shai, the precursor to the Shin Bet security service.
It discusses why the country was emptied of so many of its Arab inhabitants, dwelling on the circumstances of each village.
Compiled in late June 1948, it was titled “The Emigration of the Arabs of Palestine.”
This document was the basis for an article that Benny Morris published in 1986.
After the article appeared, the document was removed from the archive and rendered inaccessible to researchers.
Years later, the Malmab team reexamined the document, and ordered that it remain classified.
They could not have known that a few years later researchers from Akevot would find a copy of the text and run it past the military censors – who authorized its publication unconditionally.
Now, after years of concealment, the gist of the document is being revealed here.
The 25-page document begins with an introduction that unabashedly approves of the evacuation of the Arab villages.
According to the author, the month of April “excelled in an increase of emigration,” while May “was blessed with the evacuation of maximum places.”
The report then addresses “the causes of the Arab emigration.”
According to the Israeli narrative that was disseminated over the years, responsibility for the exodus from Israel rests with Arab politicians who encouraged the population to leave.
However, according to the document, 70 percent of the Arabs left as a result of Jewish military operations.
Palestinian children awaiting distribution of milk by UNICEF at the Nazareth Franciscan Sisters’ convent, on January 1, 1950. AW / UN Photo
The unnamed author of the text ranks the reasons for the Arabs’ departure in order of importance.
The first reason: “Direct Jewish acts of hostility against Arab places of settlement.”
The second reason was the impact of those actions on neighboring villages.
Third in importance came “operations by the breakaways,” namely the Irgun and Lehi undergrounds.
The fourth reason for the Arab exodus was orders issued by Arab institutions and “gangs” (as the document refers to all Arab fighting groups); fifth was “Jewish ‘whispering operations’ to induce the Arab inhabitants to flee”; and the sixth factor was “evacuation ultimatums.”
The author asserts that, “without a doubt, the hostile operations were the main cause of the movement of the population.”
In addition, “Loudspeakers in the Arabic language proved their effectiveness on the occasions when they were utilized properly.”
As for Irgun and Lehi operations, the report observes that “many in the villages of central Galilee started to flee following the abduction of the notables of Sheikh Muwannis [a village north of Tel Aviv].
The Arab learned that it is not enough to forge an agreement with the Haganah and that there are other Jews [i.e., the breakaway militias] to beware of.”
The author notes that ultimatums to leave were especially employed in central Galilee, less so in the Mount Gilboa region.
“Naturally, the act of this ultimatum, like the effect of the ‘friendly advice,’ came after a certain preparing of the ground by means of hostile actions in the area.”
An appendix to the document describes the specific causes of the exodus from each of scores of Arab locales: Ein Zeitun – “our destruction of the village”; Qeitiya – “harassment, threat of action”; Almaniya – “our action, many killed”; Tira – “friendly Jewish advice”; Al’Amarir – “after robbery and murder carried out by the breakaways”; Sumsum – “our ultimatum”; Bir Salim – “attack on the orphanage”; and Zarnuga – “conquest and expulsion.”
Short fuse
In the early 2000s, the Yitzhak Rabin Center conducted a series of interviews with former public and military figures as part of a project to document their activity in the service of the state.
The long arm of Malmab seized on these interviews, too. Haaretz, which obtained the original texts of several of the interviews, compared them to the versions that are now available to the public, after large swaths of them were declared classified.
These included, for example, sections of the testimony of Brig. Gen. (res.) Aryeh Shalev about the expulsion across the border of the residents of a village he called “Sabra.”
Later in the interview, the following sentences were deleted: “There was a very serious problem in the valley.
There were refugees who wanted to return to the valley, to the Triangle [a concentration of Arab towns and villages in eastern Israel].
We expelled them. I met with them to persuade them not to want that. I have papers about it.”
In another case, Malmab decided to conceal the following segment from an interview that historian Boaz Lev Tov conducted with Maj. Gen. (res.) Elad Peled:
Lev Tov: “We’re talking about a population – women and children?”
Peled: “All, all. Yes.”
Lev Tov: “Don’t you distinguish between them?”
Peled: “The problem is very simple. The war is between two populations. They come out of their home.”
Lev Tov: “If the home exists, they have somewhere to return to?”
Peled: “It’s not armies yet, it’s gangs. We’re also actually gangs. We come out of the house and return to the house. They come out of the house and return to the house. It’s either their house or our house.”
Lev Tov: “Qualms belong to the more recent generation?”
Peled: “Yes, today. When I sit in an armchair here and think about what happened, all kinds of thoughts come to mind.”
Lev Tov: “Wasn’t that the case then?”
Peled: “Look, let me tell you something even less nice and cruel, about the big raid in Sasa [Palestinian village in Upper Galilee].
The goal was actually to deter them, to tell them, ‘Dear friends, the Palmach [the Haganah “shock troops”] can reach every place, you are not immune.’
That was the heart of the Arab settlement. But what did we do? My platoon blew up 20 homes with everything that was there.”
Lev Tov: “While people were sleeping there?”
Peled: “I suppose so. What happened there, we came, we entered the village, planted a bomb next to every house, and afterward Homesh blew on a trumpet, because we didn’t have radios, and that was the signal [for our forces] to leave.
We’re running in reverse, the sappers stay, they pull, it’s all primitive. They light the fuse or pull the detonator and all those houses are gone.”
IDF soldiers guarding Palestinians in Ramle, in 1948. Collection of Benno Rothenberg/The IDF and Defense Establishment Archives
Another passage that the Defense Ministry wanted to keep from the public came from Dr. Lev Tov’s conversation with Maj. Gen. Avraham Tamir:
Tamir: “I was under Chera [Maj. Gen. Tzvi Tzur, later IDF chief of staff], and I had excellent working relations with him.
He gave me freedom of action – don’t ask – and I happened to be in charge of staff and operations work during two developments deriving from [Prime Minister David] Ben-Gurion’s policy.
One development was when reports arrived about marches of refugees from Jordan toward the abandoned villages [in Israel].
And then Ben-Gurion lays down as policy that we have to demolish [the villages] so they won’t have anywhere to return to.
That is, all the Arab villages, most of which were in [the area covered by] Central Command, most of them.”
Lev Tov: “The ones that were still standing?”
Tamir: “The ones that weren’t yet inhabited by Israelis.
There were places where we had already settled Israelis, like Zakariyya and others.
But most of them were still abandoned villages.”
Lev Tov: “That were standing?”
Tamir: “Standing. It was necessary for there to be no place for them to return to, so I mobilized all the engineering battalions of Central Command, and within 48 hours I knocked all those villages to the ground. Period.
There’s no place to return to.”
Lev Tov: “Without hesitation, I imagine.”
Tamir: “Without hesitation. That was the policy. I mobilized, I carried it out and I did it.”
Crates in vaults
The vault of the Yad Yaari Research and Documentation Center is one floor below ground level.
In the vault, which is actually a small, well-secured room, are stacks of crates containing classified documents.
The archive houses the materials of the Hashomer Hatzair movement, the Kibbutz Ha’artzi kibbutz movement, Mapam, Meretz and other bodies, such as Peace Now.
The archive’s director is Dudu Amitai, who is also chairman of the Association of Israel Archivists.
According to Amitai, Malmab personnel visited the archive regularly between 2009 and 2011.
Staff of the archive relate that security department teams – two Defense Ministry retirees with no archival training – would show up two or three times a week.
They searched for documents according to such keywords as “nuclear,” “security” and “censorship,” and also devoted considerable time to the War of Independence and the fate of the pre-1948 Arab villages.
“In the end, they submitted a summary to us, saying that they had located a few dozen sensitive documents,” Amitai says.
“We don’t usually take apart files, so dozens of files, in their entirety, found their way into our vault and were removed from the public catalog.”
A file might contain more than 100 documents.
One of the files that was sealed deals with the military government that controlled the lives of Israel’s Arab citizens from 1948 until 1966.
For years, the documents were stored in the same vault, inaccessible to scholars.
Recently, in the wake of a request by Prof. Gadi Algazi, a historian from Tel Aviv University, Amitai examined the file himself and ruled that there was no reason not to unseal it, Malmab’s opinion notwithstanding.
According to Algazi, there could be several reasons for Malmab’s decision to keep the file classified.
One of them has to do with a secret annex it contains to a report by a committee that examined the operation of the military government.
The report deals almost entirely with land-ownership battles between the state and Arab citizens, and barely touches on security matters.
Another possibility is a 1958 report by the ministerial committee that oversaw the military government.
In one of the report’s secret appendixes, Col. Mishael Shaham, a senior officer in the military government, explains that one reason for not dismantling the martial law apparatus is the need to restrict Arab citizens’ access to the labor market and to prevent the reestablishment of destroyed villages.
A third possible explanation for hiding the file concerns previously unpublished historical testimony about the expulsion of Bedouin.
On the eve of Israel’s establishment, nearly 100,000 Bedouin lived in the Negev.
Three years later, their number was down to 13,000. In the years during and after the independence war, a number of expulsion operations were carried out in the country’s south.
In one case, United Nations observers reported that Israel had expelled 400 Bedouin from the Azazma tribe and cited testimonies of tents being burned.
The letter that appears in the classified file describes a similar expulsion carried out as late as 1956, as related by geologist Avraham Parnes:
The evacuation of Iraq al-Manshiyya, near today’s Kiryat Gat, in March, 1949. Collection of Benno Rothenberg/The IDF and Defense Establishment Archives
“A month ago we toured Ramon [crater]. The Bedouin in the Mohila area came to us with their flocks and their families and asked us to break bread with them.
I replied that we had a great deal of work to do and didn’t have time.
In our visit this week, we headed toward Mohila again.
Instead of the Bedouin and their flocks, there was deathly silence.
Scores of camel carcasses were scattered in the area. We learned that three days earlier the IDF had ‘screwed’ the Bedouin, and their flocks were destroyed – the camels by shooting, the sheep with grenades.
One of the Bedouin, who started to complain, was killed, the rest fled.”
The testimony continued, “Two weeks earlier, they’d been ordered to stay where they were for the time being, afterward they were ordered to leave, and to speed things up 500 head were slaughtered…. The expulsion was executed ‘efficiently.’”
The letter goes on to quote what one of the soldiers said to Parnes, according to his testimony: “They won’t go unless we’ve screwed their flocks.
A young girl of about 16 approached us. She had a beaded necklace of brass snakes.
We tore the necklace and each of us took a bead for a souvenir.”
The letter was originally sent to MK Yaakov Uri, from Mapai (forerunner of Labor), who passed it on to Development Minister Mordechai Bentov (Mapam).
“His letter shocked me,” Uri wrote Bentov.
The latter circulated the letter among all the cabinet ministers, writing, “It is my opinion that the government cannot simply ignore the facts related in the letter.”
Bentov added that, in light of the appalling contents of the letter, he asked security experts to check its credibility. They had confirmed that the contents “do in fact generally conform to the truth.”
Nuclear excuse
It was during the tenure of historian Tuvia Friling as Israel’s chief archivist, from 2001 to 2004, that Malmab carried out its first archival incursions.
What began as an operation to prevent the leakage of nuclear secrets, he says, became, in time, a large-scale censorship project.
“I resigned after three years, and that was one of the reasons,” Prof. Friling says.
“The classification placed on the document about the Arabs’ emigration in 1948 is precisely an example of what I was apprehensive about.
The storage and archival system is not an arm of the state’s public relations.
If there’s something you don’t like – well, that’s life.
A healthy society also learns from its mistakes.”
Why did Friling allow the Defense Ministry to have access the archives?
The reason, he says, was the intention to give the public access to archival material via the internet.
In discussions about the implications of digitizing the material, concern was expressed that references in the documents to a “certain topic” would be made public by mistake.
The topic, of course, is Israel’s nuclear project. Friling insists that the only authorization Malmab received was to search for documents on that subject.
But Malmab’s activity is only one example of a broader problem, Friling notes: “In 1998, the confidentiality of the [oldest documents in the] Shin Bet and Mossad archives expired.
For years those two institutions disdained the chief archivist.
When I took over, they requested that the confidentiality of all the material be extended [from 50] to 70 years, which is ridiculous – most of the material can be opened.”
In 2010, the confidentiality period was extended to 70 years; last February it was extended again, to 90 years, despite the opposition of the Supreme Council of Archives.
“The state may impose confidentiality on some of its documentation,” Friling says.
“The question is whether the issue of security doesn’t act as a kind of cover. In many cases, it’s already become a joke.”
In the view of Yad Yaari’s Dudu Amitai, the confidentiality imposed by the Defense Ministry must be challenged.
In his period at the helm, he says, one of the documents placed in the vault was an order issued by an IDF general, during a truce in the War of Independence, for his troops to refrain from rape and looting.
Amitai now intends to go over the documents that were deposited in the vault, especially 1948 documents, and open whatever is possible.
“We’ll do it cautiously and responsibly, but recognizing that the State of Israel has to learn how to cope with the less pleasant aspects of its history.”
In contrast to Yad Yaari, where ministry personnel no longer visit, they are continuing to peruse documents at Yad Tabenkin, the research and documentation center of the United Kibbutz Movement.
The director, Aharon Azati, reached an agreement with the Malmab teams under which documents will be transferred to the vault only if he is convinced that this is justified.
But in Yad Tabenkin, too, Malmab has broadened its searches beyond the realm of nuclear project to encompass interviews conducted by archival staff with former members of the Palmach, and has even perused material about the history of the settlements in the occupied territories.
Malmab has, for example, shown interest in the Hebrew-language book “A Decade of Discretion: Settlement Policy in the Territories 1967-1977,” published by Yad Tabenkin in 1992, and written by Yehiel Admoni, director of the Jewish Agency’s Settlement Department during the decade he writes about.
The book mentions a plan to settle Palestinian refugees in the Jordan Valley and to the uprooting of 1,540 Bedouin families from the Rafah area of the Gaza Strip in 1972, including an operation that included the sealing of wells by the IDF.
Ironically, in the case of the Bedouin, Admoni quotes former Justice Minister Yaakov Shimshon Shapira as saying, “It is not necessary to stretch the security rationale too far.
The whole Bedouin episode is not a glorious chapter of the State of Israel.”
Palestinian refugees leaving their village, unknown location, 1948. UNRWA
According to Azati, “We are moving increasingly to a tightening of the ranks.
Although this is an era of openness and transparency, there are apparently forces that are pulling in the opposite direction.”
Unauthorized secrecy
About a year ago, the legal adviser to the State Archives, attorney Naomi Aldouby, wrote an opinion titled “Files Closed Without Authorization in Public Archives.”
According to her, the accessibility policy of public archives is the exclusive purview of the director of each institution.
Despite Aldouby’s opinion, however, in the vast majority of cases, archivists who encountered unreasonable decisions by Malmab did not raise objections – that is, until 2014, when Defense Ministry personnel arrived at the archive of the Harry S. Truman Research Institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
To the visitors’ surprise, their request to examine the archive – which contains collections of former minister and diplomat Abba Eban and Maj. Gen. (res.) Shlomo Gazit – was turned down by its then director, Menahem Blondheim.
According to Blondheim, “I told them that the documents in question were decades old, and that I could not imagine that there was any security problem that would warrant restricting their access to researchers.
In response, they said, ‘And let’s say there is testimony here that wells were poisoned in the War of Independence?’ I replied, ‘Fine, those people should be brought to trial.’”
Blondheim’s refusal led to a meeting with a more senior ministry official, only this time the attitude he encountered was different and explicit threats were made. Finally the two sides reached an accommodation.
Benny Morris is not surprised at Malmab’s activity. “I knew about it,” he says “Not officially, no one informed me, but I encountered it when I discovered that documents I had seen in the past are now sealed.
When I came to the archive, I was no longer allowed to see the original, so I pointed out in a footnote [in the article] that the State Archive had denied access to documents that I had published 15 years earlier.”
The Malmab case is only one example of the battle being waged for access to archives in Israel.
According to the executive director of the Akevot Institute, Lior Yavne, “The IDF Archive, which is the largest archive in Israel, is sealed almost hermetically.
About 1 percent of the material is open.
The Shin Bet archive, which contains materials of immense importance [to scholars], is totally closed apart from a handful of documents.”
A report written by Yaacov Lozowick, the previous chief archivist at the State Archives, upon his retirement, refers to the defense establishment’s grip on the country’s archival materials.
In it, he writes, “A democracy must not conceal information because it is liable to embarrass the state.
In practice, the security establishment in Israel, and to a certain extent that of foreign relations as well, are interfering with the [public] discussion.”
Advocates of concealment put forward several arguments, Lozowick notes: “The uncovering of the facts could provide our enemies with a battering ram against us and weaken the determination of our friends; it’s liable to stir up the Arab population; it could enfeeble the state’s arguments in courts of law; and what is revealed could be interpreted as Israeli war crimes.” However, he says, “All these arguments must be rejected.
This is an attempt to hide part of the historical truth in order to construct a more convenient version.”
What Malmab says
Yehiel Horev was the keeper of the security establishment’s secrets for more than two decades.
He headed the Defense Ministry’s security department from 1986 until 2007 and naturally kept out of the limelight.
To his credit, he now agreed to talk forthrightly to Haaretz about the archives project.
“I don’t remember when it began,” Horev says, “but I do know that I started it.
If I’m not mistaken, it started when people wanted to publish documents from the archives.
We had to set up teams to examine all outgoing material.”
From conversations with archive directors, it’s clear that a good deal of the documents on which confidentiality was imposed relate to the War of Independence. Is concealing the events of 1948 part of the purpose of Malmab?
Palestinian refugees in the Ramle area, 1948. Boris Carmi / The IDF and Defense Establishment Archives
“What does ‘part of the purpose’ mean?
The subject is examined based on an approach of whether it could harm Israel’s foreign relations and the defense establishment.
Those are the criteria. I think it’s still relevant.
There has not been peace since 1948.
I may be wrong, but to the best of my knowledge the Arab-Israeli conflict has not been resolved.
So yes, it could be that problematic subjects remain.”
Asked in what way such documents might be problematic, Horev speaks of the possibility of agitation among the country’s Arab citizens.
From his point of view, every document must be perused and every case decided on its merits.
If the events of 1948 weren’t known, we could argue about whether this approach is the right one. That is not the case. Many testimonies and studies have appeared about the history of the refugee problem. What’s the point of hiding things?
“The question is whether it can do harm or not. It’s a very sensitive matter.
Not everything has been published about the refugee issue, and there are all kinds of narratives.
Some say there was no flight at all, only expulsion.
Others say there was flight. It’s not black-and-white.
There’s a difference between flight and those who say they were forcibly expelled.
It’s a different picture. I can’t say now if it merits total confidentiality, but it’s a subject that definitely has to be discussed before a decision is made about what to publish.”
For years, the Defense Ministry has imposed confidentiality on a detailed document that describes the reasons for the departure of those who became refugees.
Benny Morris has already written about the document, so what’s the logic of keeping it hidden?
“I don’t remember the document you’re referring to, but if he quoted from it and the document itself is not there [i.e., where Morris says it is], then his facts aren’t strong.
If he says, ‘Yes, I have the document,’ I can’t argue with that.
But if he says that it’s written there, that could be right and it could be wrong.
If the document were already outside and were sealed in the archive, I would say that that’s folly. But if someone quoted from it – there’s a difference of day and night in terms of the validity of the evidence he cited.”
In this case, we’re talking about the most quoted scholar when it comes to the Palestinian refugees.
“The fact that you say ‘scholar’ makes no impression on me. I know people in academia who spout nonsense about subjects that I know from A to Z.
When the state imposes confidentiality, the published work is weakened, because he doesn’t have the document.”
But isn’t concealing documents based on footnotes in books an attempt to lock the barn door after the horses have bolted?
“I gave you an example that this needn’t be the case. If someone writes that the horse is black, if the horse isn’t outside the barn, you can’t prove that it’s really black.”
There are legal opinions stating that Malmab’s activity in the archives is illegal and unauthorized.
“If I know that an archive contains classified material, I am empowered to tell the police to go there and confiscate the material.
I can also utilize the courts. I don’t need the archivist’s authorization.
If there is classified material, I have the authority to act.
Look, there’s policy.
Documents aren’t sealed for no reason.
And despite it all, I won’t say to you that everything that’s sealed is 100 percent justified [in being sealed].”
The Defense Ministry refused to respond to specific questions regarding the findings of this investigative report and made do with the following response: “The director of security of the defense establishment operates by virtue of his responsibility to protect the state’s secrets and its security assets.
The Malmab does not provide details about its mode of activity or its missions.”
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The true inheritors are the Palestinian people who have been there since Jerusalem was a Canaanite city.
Wishing my friends in Palestine a happy New Year sounded so phony, knowing how the fates have conspired to make 2023 perhaps the worst yet as their homeland continues to be cruelly occupied, plundered, and stolen by sick-minded foreign thugs while the equally sick-minded international community twiddle their thumbs.
How disgraceful that native Palestinians are faced with yet another lunatic occupying government cobbled together by Netanyahu and this time including crazed, criminal retards like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir.
The loathsome trio stated in advance their intention to get even nastier (if that were possible) with the rightful dwellers in this land.
So here’s a new regime led again by Benjamin Mileikowsky whose East European family adopted the more Hebrew-sounding surname, Netanyahu, meaning ‘God has given’.
He is one of so many with a fake name to fool everyone into thinking their ancestral roots are in the Holy Land.
Netanyahu is a man desperately dodging corruption charges and hoping the high office will keep him out of jail…. a man wanted for crimes against humanity who should be dragged in chains in front of the International Criminal Court at The Hague.
As long ago as 2015, he felt untouchable enough to announce that if he was returned to power, a Palestinian state would not be established because handing back stolen territory threatens Israel’s security.
And in August 2017 he said that Israel would hang on to the West Bank permanently and there would be no more uprooting of squatter ‘settlements’: “We are here to stay forever…. This is the inheritance of our ancestors. This is our land.” Which of course is a lie.
The true inheritors are the Palestinian people who have been there since Jerusalem was a Canaanite city.
Few, if any, in Netanyahu’s government have ancestral links to the Holy Land so their claim to it is false.
SHUTTING DOWN THE NEWS! In this undated photo provided by Al Jazeera Media Network, Shireen Abu Akleh, a journalist for Al Jazeera network, stands next to a TV camera in an area where the Dome of the Rock shrine at Al-Aqsa Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem is seen at left in the background.Abu Akleh, a well-known Palestinian female reporter for the broadcaster’s Arabic language channel, was shot and killed while covering an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank town of Jenin early Wednesday, May 11, 2022. (Al Jazeera Media Network via AP)
And who are the Israeli extremists effectively controlling Palestinian lives from now on?
Bezalel Smotrich is an Israeli lawyer born in a religious Israeli ‘settlement’, or squat, in the illegally occupied Golan Heights which actually belongs to Syria. He grew up in another squat in the West Bank and now lives in yet another.
That makes him a three-time war criminal at least.
As a lawyer, he shows scant respect for the law.
His ancestral links are with Ukraine.
Smotrich has advocated a shoot-to-kill policy against Palestinians (mostly youths) throwing stones when confronting the occupying Israeli military.
He is said to have also played a key role in Israeli legislation to legalize the annexation of Palestinian lands and a law banning advocates of BDS (the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement) from visiting Israel.
He has long urged Israeli annexation of the West Bank, defended squatter violence against Palestinians, and recently produced his masterpiece, the Subjugation Plan.
Itamar Ben-Gvir’s grandparents were Kurdish/Iraqi Jewish immigrants.
He belonged to a youth movement that was branded a terrorist organization and outlawed even by the Israeli government, and he avoided military service with the IDF because of his extreme-right political background, a useful wheeze adopted by cowards to escape their national duty.
A lawyer with a long criminal record himself, he too lives in an illegal squat on the outskirts of Hebron, so is also a war criminal.
He used to have a photo of Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Muslims at the Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994, hanging in his home.
These two thugs with no ancestral links to ancient Israel will be ordering Palestinians around in their own homeland and, we can be sure, making their lives a living hell with the full backing of the racist occupying power.
Ben-Gvir wasted no time. Within days of taking office, he and his gruesome entourage were strutting around the Al Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third holiest site, in a provocative move that was condemned far and wide as incitement to violence.
The visit, or raid as some call it, coincided with a quiet time and lasted only 13 minutes, revealing this loony’s nervousness at his own foolish action.
Jeff Halper, who kindly penned the Foreword to my book Radio Free Palestine, gives us an insider’s view on the new situation in a piece ‘The Zionist Cossacks Have Been Released on the Palestinians’:
Benjamin Netanyahu, due to return as Israel’s prime minister within the next few days, has one overriding concern: evading conviction and possible imprisonment in the three corruption cases for which he is currently being tried.
After last month’s election in which the fascist settler party Religious Zionism won 15 seats – absolutely critical if Netanyahu is to set up a coalition government – he entered into a Devil’s Deal that has shaken even members of his own Likud party.
In return for helping to pass legislation to “reform” the judicial system, including legislation that would annul Netanyahu’s trial and invalidate the ability of the Supreme Court to override the overtly illegal reforms Netanyahu needs, he has agreed to give virtually unchecked power to the settlers to complete their eviction of the Palestinians from Area C, the 62% of the West Bank controlled by Israel in which the settlements are located, and to employ the army, police, militias and the prison service to violently repress any Palestinian resistance.
To save his own skin, Netanyahu has done exactly what Russian Czar Alexander III did in the 1880s.
Just as the Czar handed over his country’s Jewish population to the murderous and antisemitic Cossacks, which initiated 20 years of pogroms that killed thousands and drove millions of Jews westward, so too has Netanyahu done so by handing over the fate of the Palestinians to murderous settlers dedicated to driving them out of the Land of Israel, taking their lands – and not hesitating for a second to kill as many as necessary in the process.
Jeff Halper is an American-Israeli Jew living in Jerusalem.
He is the Director of ICAHD (Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions) and promotes the idea of One Democratic State.
He’s also living proof that not all Jews are Zionists and was nominated, together with Palestinian intellectual Ghassan Andoni, for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his work “to liberate both the Palestinian and the Israeli people from the yoke of structural violence” and “to build equality between their people by recognizing and celebrating their common humanity.”
Precious little humanity is being shown by the Israeli side these days, however…
Israeli Final Solution Soldiers tend to one of their “vermin”; an indigenous Palestinian who just wants to live in freedom on the land of his ancestors
Palestinians are ‘interlopers’ in their own homeland?
So, after decades of cruel oppression, Palestinians end a murderous 2022 (in which over 150 of them were killed, including 33 innocent children) and begin 2023 menaced once again by this maniac Netanyahu.
Marwan Bishara writing in Al Jazeera tells how warnings about Israel “heading toward a fascist theocracy” and “sleep-walking into Jewish fascism” have multiplied. As for the Arab regimes which congratulated Netanyahu on another election victory, he says: “I can’t quite find an appropriate word.”
Through their wonky upside-down lens Israel’s far-right fanatics view the Palestinians as interlopers in their promised land.
“Indeed, the new Netanyahu-led government vehemently opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state, supports the expansion of illegal Jewish settlement in the occupied Palestinian territories, strives to annex part if not all of the West Bank, and denies equality to the native Palestinian minority in the Jewish State.
It will demand that the Palestinians admit their historic defeat and recognize the Jews’ exclusive ownership of the country in order to live in peace.”
Bishara writes that Netanyahu’s new extremist partners “have agreed to use their parliamentary majority to curtail the role of the judicial branch and end the supreme court’s oversight over the Knesset.
This will not only allow Netanyahu to tighten his grip over the country, but also help him escape legal accountability following his indictment on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust”.
And Lawrence Davidson provides a useful summing-up: “What you now see so publicly demonstrated is, and always has been, Zionist Israel’s true culture and character – a state designed for one group alone and built on the conquest and dispossession of others… And the cost?
It is to be understood not only in terms of Palestinian rights but also the very essence of Judaism, both of which are being destroyed simultaneously.”
Meanwhile, Israel’s brutal regime with its obscene policies continues to be admired – even idolized – by our apartheid-loving Conservative government who keep telling us they share its values. Incredible.
If this was being done to Jewish children anywhere there would be world outrage and calls for sanctions, but not for Palestinian kids.
Official protection needed for Palestinians
Halper is so worried that he is urging for the UN to deploy a Protection Force in the OPT (Occupied Palestinian Territories), something the Palestinian Authority previously called for.
“Israel opposes that, of course, wanting a free hand to Judaize the West Bank. And, indeed, every time a resolution to establish such a force has been brought before the Security Council, the US has vetoed it.
“This is the time, in my view, that every Palestinian support group in the world should set aside the important campaigns they are pursuing in order to focus on this most urgent need: establishing a UN Protection Force for a Palestinian population whose very existence is in immediate peril.”
As if to confirm this fear, just as I was finishing up I spotted a report in Middle East Eye about Zvika Fogel, an MP with Ben-Gvir’s ultra-nationalist Jewish Power party and clearly unhinged, saying in an interview that Israel’s policy of going to war with Palestinians every two or three years wasn’t enough and that it should “subdue them once and for all”.
“We are too merciful,” he said. “It’s time for us to stop being so…. If it is one Israeli mother crying, or a thousand Palestinian mothers crying, then a thousand Palestinian mothers will cry. It has nothing to do with racism.”
The Judaics were supposed to stay in a small designated land area, but quickly formed terrorists groups to murder Palestinians and steal more land. The British peace-keepers were blown up in their hotel and driven out by these Judaic terror groups.
Creating and controlling most of the world’s money has provided a lot of continuing power and that is what these World Zionist do by issuing debt-notes no longer backed by any real commodities, gold or silver.
Once these RKM had gained control over the creation and distribution of US money with no oversight or auditing ever, they could issue and print all the money they wanted as unbacked debt-notes and buy up, bribe or human compromise almost every single member of Congress and even most presidents.
