WARNING: STRONG LANGUAGE

By Mantiq al-Tayr * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

1. Minnesota House member Erik Paulsen (Likud) continues his hasbara work on behalf of the State of Israel doing so via the funding of the AIEF which is a US tax-deductible arm of AIPAC. In his fifth post from Israel he writes approvingly of the views of an Israeli war criminal with whom he had apparently a lengthy discussion. Paulsen ought to be publicly tarred and feathered and his passport ought to be revoked before he can return to the United States. Fortunately some of the readers here at Mantiq al-Tayr have been posting comments to his ridiculous blog posts and have been making Paulsen and his Israel-first supporters a little uncomfortable.

So far Paulsen has made six daily posts, all of them utterly devoid of any substance and all of which could easily have been written by AIPAC staffers. Maybe they were. Pure unadulterated Zionist Bullshit, but I'll get to that later. First I'm going to quote in full from his website from a page called "Issues and Legislation". The first "issue" he lists is "Defending Our Homeland" and it reads like it could have been written by a Nazi. Maybe it was. Here's the whole thing. Note to Shas Party members, the red highlighting is mine. Second note to Shas Party members: Could you guys get Paulsen to join your party and run for the Knesset? But I digress.

"Our national sovereignty rests in our ability to defend the nation from those who want to harm us. Despite the fact that we've made great strides in terms of national security since 9/11, securing the safety of our nation and citizens remains our greatest duty. We are still facing a very real enemy - an enemy that will stop at nothing to bring harm to the American people.

"We must never relent in defending against this enemy and I support a strong national defense to ensure that the American people are safe and secure. A strong defense includes strong law enforcement, secure borders, a strong military and vigorous intelligence services. It also includes drastically reducing our dependence on foreign oil.

"As our brave men and women continue to serve in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the world they deserve our full and unwavering support. The security we all enjoy is a direct result of their selfless sacrifice and I stand firmly behind these brave Americans, their families and their mission."

If that doesn't give you the creeps then you must be a Zionist.

Paulsen doesn't even mention who this enemy is that requires utterly bankrupting our country in order to defend ourselves against it. But the obvious enemy is them thar Moooooooooooselims.

It's interesting too that I can't seem to find any mention of his hasbara trip to Israel on his actual web site, his posts are put on the TC Jewfolk page instead. You'd think he'd want to proclaim his allegiances proudly on his own website too. But I digress.

So, let's look at one of his posts and seriously exam it and make endless fun of it in the process. Sit back and enjoy the ride.

Let's look at post number five because, well, because he meets an Israeli war-criminal who sometimes can't travel outside of Israel for fear of arrest. He seems to like this war criminal, Avi Dichter, very much. Let's see what Paulsen tells his "constituents," and I use that term loosely, about meeting Avi boy.

Oh wait, before I get to what Paulsen says, dig this picture of Avi.

Pretty cool, mish kida?

Anyway, let's see what good old Rep. Paulsen, in Israel on a trip paid-for by an arm of AIPAC that is recognized as a tax-deductable charity, has to say about Avi.

"Began the morning meeting with the opposition leader of parliament from the Kadima party, Avi Dichter. Avi is the former head of our FBI equivalent and gave an in depth briefing on a variety of security issues and the peace process."

Hold it, before I quote further I need to make a comment. Dichter is the "former head of our FBI equivalent"? Really? Let's be more specific. Avi Dichter is the former head of Shin Bet (aka Shabak), the Israeli "internal" security service that also is deeply involved in f***ing up Palestinians living under occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. In fact, it is because of his highly criminal activities while heading Shin Bet from 2000 to 2005 that Avi has a little trouble traveling – could not even go to Madrid last year for fear of being arrested. It's kind of like saying, "Began the morning meeting with O.J. Simpson, the former husband of Nicole Brown Simpson" and leaving it at that. But I digress. More on Avi later. Let's get back to the Zionist Bullshit from Paulsen.

"I found this particularly interesting not for the subject matter, but because as the leader of the opposition party I expected he would really spend his time with us discussing his party's policy differences with the ruling party. The fact that he used his time to share a united vision with the majority party really does demonstrate that Israelis are pretty unified on safety and security issues. Rockets were fired on his hometown early this morning."

Oh, poor baby, during a week in which Israeli killed at least 23 Palestinians from Gaza plus three Egyptian security officers, Paulsen bitches and moans about rockets being fired on Avi's home town – clearly doing so to show how the "enemy" is just plain evil.

What is Avi's hometown? Well, surprise, surprise it is Ashkelon which, when it was called al-Majdal, was largely ethnically cleansed by the Israelis in 1948 with the job being finished off in 1950. Many of its inhabitants were forcefully removed by Israel and the Haganah to Gaza. Think they might be pissed off by this?

Let's look at some of the lovely history of "Ashkelon" under the tender mercies of Zionism.

"In July 1950, Majdal - today Ashkelon – was still a mixed town. About 3,000 Palestinians lived there in a closed, fenced-off ghetto, next to the recently arrived Jewish residents. Before the 1948 war, Majdal had been a commercial and administrative center with a population of 12,000. It also had religious importance: nearby, amid the ruins of ancient Ashkelon, stood Mash'had Nabi Hussein, an 11th-century structure where, according to tradition, the head of Hussein Bin Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was interred; his death in Karbala, Iraq, marked the onset of the rift between Shi'ites and Sunnis. Muslim pilgrims, both Shi'ite and Sunni, would visit the site. But after July 1950, there was nothing left for them to visit: that's when the Israel Defense Forces blew up Mash'had Nabi Hussein."

Even the Zionist-infested Wikipedia shows just how wonderfully the Jews treated the town's original inhabitants.

"During the 1948 war, the Egyptian army occupied a large part of Gaza including Majdal. Over the next few months, the town was subjected to Israeli air-raids and shelling. All but about 1,000 of the town's residents were forced to leave by the time it was captured by Israeli forces as a sequel to Operation Yoav on November 4, 1948."

It gets better. Look at the wonderful treatment the Jews continued to give to the goddamn ungrateful terrorist Arabs.

"General Yigal Allon ordered the expulsion of the remaining Arabs but the local commanders did not do so and the Arab population soon recovered to more than 2,500 due mostly to refugees slipping back and also due to the transfer of Arabs from nearby villages. Most of them were elderly, women, or children. During the next year or so, the Arabs were held in a confined area surrounded by barbed wire, which became commonly known as the "ghetto". Moshe Dayan and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion were in favor of expulsion, while Mapam and the Israeli labor union Histadrut objected. The government offered the Arabs positive inducements to leave, including a favorable currency exchange, but also caused panic through night-time raids. The first group was deported to the Gaza Strip by truck on August 17, 1950 after an expulsion order had been served. The deportation was approved by Ben-Gurion and Dayan over the objections of Pinhas Lavon, secretary-general of the Histadrut, who envisioned the town as a productive example of equal opportunity. By October 1950, 20 Arab families remained, most of whom later moved to Lydda or Gaza.

After kicking the Arabs out the Jews then undertook a very-well organized campaign to fill the town with Jews. It was quite successful.

"Re-population of abandoned Arab dwellings by Jews became official policy by December 1948 but the process began slowly. The Israeli national plan of June 1949 designated Majdal as the site for a regional urban center of 20,000 people. From July 1949, new immigrants and demobilized soldiers moved to the new town, increasing the Jewish population to 2,500 within six months. The town was initially called Migdal Gaza, Migdal Gad and Migdal Ashkelon. In 1953, the nearby neighborhood of Afridar was incorporated and the name "Ashkelon" was adopted. By 1961, Ashkelon ranked 18th amongst Israeli urban centers with a population of 24,000.

And in that thoroughly ethnically cleansed place, war criminal Avi Dichter was born in 1952. And Paulsen has the nerve to mention those stupid rockets which seem to serve Israel's interests far more than those of the Palestinians for whom Paulsen cares nothing.

I guess Paulsen did do one good thing in this post. He unintentionally makes Salam Fayyad look like the sell-out that he is. But then, after a Zionist-Bullshit-filled reference to Hizbullah Paulsen moves on to how he ended the day.

"Arrived at the hotel and had a late dinner. The fun event for the day – a midnight swim in the Sea of Galilee!"

Fortunately for Paulsen, the area around the sea of Galilee was also ethnically cleansed by Israel back in 1948, so Paulsen could enjoy his swim.

"The Israeli military activities were confined to the Galilee and the sparsely populated Negev desert. It was clear to the villages in the Galilee, that if they left, return was far from imminent. Therefore, far fewer villages spontaneously depopulated than previously. Most of the Palestinian exodus was due to a clear, direct cause: expulsion and deliberate harassment, as Morris writes 'commanders were clearly bent on driving out the population in the area they were conquering'.

"During Operation Hiram in the upper Galilee, Israeli military commanders received the order: 'Do all you can to immediately and quickly purge the conquered territories of all hostile elements in accordance with the orders issued. The residents should be helped to leave the areas that have been conquered'. (31 October 1948, Moshe Carmel) The UN's acting Mediator, Ralph Bunche, reported that United Nations Observers had recorded extensive looting of villages in Galilee by Israeli forces, who carried away goats, sheep and mules. This looting, United Nations Observers report, appeared to have been systematic as army trucks were used for transportation. The situation, states the report, created a new influx of refugees into Lebanon. Israeli forces, he stated, have occupied the area in Galilee formerly occupied by Kaukji's forces, and have crossed the Lebanese frontier. Bunche goes on to say "that Israeli forces now hold positions inside the south-east corner of Lebanon, involving some fifteen Lebanese villages which are occupied by small Israeli detachments".

"According to Morris altogether 200,000–230,000 Palestinians left in this stage. According to Ilan Pappé, "In a matter of seven months, five hundred and thirty one villages were destroyed and eleven urban neighborhoods emptied [...] The mass expulsion was accompanied by massacres, rape and [the] imprisonment of men [...] in labor camps for periods [of] over a year".

Wherever Paulsen goes on his trip he is standing on stolen land belonging to the native population that has been under and endless onslaught by Israel's Jews for well over 60 years. Over six decades of pillage, murder, rape – you name it. Kind of like what's in the Bible, but I digress.

2. So just who is Avi Dichter and why is he so universally hated? The Center for Constitutional Rights is a good place to start. Turns out that Avi likes to kill lots of Arabs at a time no matter who they are. So in July of 2002, as head of Shin Bet, he decided to assassinate Salah Shehadah, the leader of Hamas' military wing at the time. In order to do this, he had a one-ton bomb dropped into a residential apartment building in Gaza city knowing that this would lead to killing and injuring countless others.

"Just before midnight on July 22, 2002, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) dropped a one-ton bomb on Al-Daraj, a densely-populated residential neighborhood in Gaza City in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). Among the 15 people who were killed were 8 children, and more than 150 were injured in the aerial bombing. The attack completely destroyed 9 apartment buildings and partially destroyed or seriously damaged 30 more."

Killing Palestinians is the national pass-time in Israel, as I have documented more than once on this site. The more you kill the more pissed off the Palestinians get so they retaliate and Israel then uses Palestinian retaliation as an excuse to kill even more Palestinians, continue to steal their land, and to get aid and support from tools like Paulsen who are all too happy to have US blood shed on behalf of Israel and the phony war on terror. The Center for Constitutional Rights notes:

"According to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), approximately 724 individuals were killed in these extrajudicial killings carried out by Israel between September 2000 and March 2008; the victims included 228 civilian bystanders, of whom 77 were children."

A law suit was filed in 2005 against Dichter on behalf of his victims in the 2002 bombing. Sadly, it was done in the Southern District of New York where it was virtually doomed to failure. And in fact, in 2007 Judge William Pauley dismissed the case on a technicality saying that Dichter was immune from prosecution because he was acting "in the course of his official duties" as the Center reports. The dismissal was appealed but Pauley's ruling was upheld. Therefore, according to US law, the deliberate murder of innocent civilians including children undertaken by someone on a government payroll at the time is not a crime that can be prosecuted. War crimes are now legal.

Let me digress. In 2009 Judge Pauley allowed Israeli spy Ben-Ami Kadish to walk free. Fining him 50 thousand dollars but no jail time. Okay, back to your regularly scheduled blogging.

Fortunately, many people in the US and around the world realize what bullshit this is and Dichter has trouble when he travels. Even in the Zionist bastion of Brandeis University students protested his appearing there in April of this year.

"In addition to ordering the torture of Palestinians during his tenure as the head of Israel's General Security Services, Dichter has been charged with possible war crimes for his part in the 2002 killing of Hamas member Salah Shehade and 14 other Palestinian civilians, including 9 children, who were in his Gaza Strip apartment building when a one-ton Israeli bomb was dropped on it.

"As Dicther was speaking at Brandeis, a dozen Brandeis students listed charges against Dichter, including torture and the bombing of civilians, distributed warrants for his arrest, and demanded he turn himself in to authorities,

"They ended their disruption by chanting in Hebrew "Don't worry Avi Dicther, we'll meet you in the Hague."

In 2007 Dichter had to cancel plans to go to the UK because of the likelihood that he could be arrested if a complaint were filed against him and in 2010 he had to cancel plans to go to Madrid for the same reason.

And then there is also the organization known as WANTED made up of anonymous Israelis who have created a website called wanted.org.il that contains bills of indictment against a number of Israeli past and present officials. Dichter is prominent among them and the photo insert near the top of this post is from their website.

Hey you good folks at WANTED how does this one look?

Courtesy of Skulz Fontaine

3. Okay, it's video time. Here's a short clip of the students at Brandeis.

Video link: http://youtu.be/tyH8iQByNlY

The video below shows that not all of Paulsen's constituents are morons. They also don't like his relationship with the Koch brothers. I love the woman who says: "And again it's always interesting that we never seem to be able to talk to Representative Paulsen, he's always gone or doing something else and yet we are all his constituents." She's right, presently he's off kissing Israel's ass and posting Zionist propaganda on a pro-Israeli website while saying nothing about the trip on his own website.

Video link: http://youtu.be/QiT2cjj68EA

A faithful reader, quite literally from down under going by the name of "bin dead awhile" has been requesting another Haifa video. This is a nice one.

Video link: http://youtu.be/PyppUVrcOY8

As the bird sang:

"خبيني عندك خبيني دخلك يا نونو"

The angelic voice of اميمة الخليل

Video link: http://youtu.be/OaGLNWyb5Lk

Here's a slightly edited comment from the youtube url above explaining the song for those of you who do not know the language.

"The song is a dialogue between a bird and a girl called Nunu. The bird arrives at Nunu's window seeking refuge; he explains that he comes from the borders of the skies, from the neighbours'; that he has escaped from his cage and asks Nunu to hide him. The bird is scared and weak; he has lost his feathers, and has lost all hope. Nunu shows the bird the rising sun and the nearby forest where other birds fly freely, and reassures him that he too will eventually gain his freedom."

* Mantiq al-Tayr is a blogger who is attempting to wake up other American citizens to the true dangers and challenges which face their country and is devoted to justice for the Palestinian people. Truth is his objective, satire is his tool. He also enjoys reading the Qur'an from time to time. See his website.

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• Support Your Own Illegal Israeli Settlement [Satire]
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By Antoine Raffoul * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Edward Said

A recent reading of an old article written by the late Edward Said, the well-known Palestinian author, writer and cultural critic, revealed a rare meeting in Paris to discuss the core issues of the Palestine/Israel conflict. The participants were Israel's rising 'new' historians at the time (professor Ilan Pappe, Benny Morris, Itamar Rabinowitch and Zeev Sternhell) and their Palestinian counterparts (Elie Sanbar, Nur Masalha and Said himself).

In the article, Edward Said noted that during the informal discussions which took place, the Israeli side (with the rare exception of professor Pappe) spoke of 'the need for detachment, critical distance and reflective calm', while the Palestinian was 'much more urgent, more severe and even emotional in its insistence on the need for a new history'.

Said's article touched on the core subject of the meeting: the need to look at the history of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict from the Palestinian point of view and to bring to the fore the events that lead to the 1948 Palestinian Nakba. Despite the attempt by some of the Israeli historians to admit that 'an injustice' may have been committed by the Israelis in 1948, the belief amongst most of them was that it was 'a necessary conquest'. Only professor Pappe spoke with powerful eloquence delivering, in Said's words, 'an espousal of the Palestinian point of view and...[providing] the most iconoclastic and brilliant of the Israeli interventions'.

Yes, the Israelis in Paris said, they wanted peace, but, no, they did not inflict the Nakba of 1948 on the Palestinians.

Again, Edward Said wrote, with the exception of professor Pappe, the rest of the Israeli team members, showed a 'profound contradiction, bordering on schizophrenia that informs their work'. They seemed to hesitate 'when pushed hard by either Pappe or by the Palestinians'.

The Paris meeting took place in early May 1998. The Oslo euphoria was still in the air and (hold your breath) Benyamin Netanyahu was enjoying his first term as Israel's Prime Minister (1996-1999). Under him, Israel held all the Palestinian territories occupied by force in 1948, 1949 and 1967 (and for those who need a reminder, that's ALL of historic Palestine); it had the most formidable military power in the region; it dictated all the rules of occupation on an occupied civilian population in the OPT and it had the luxury of time and space at its disposal.

Slow forward seven years to May 2005, when George W. Bush was claiming the mantle of yet another failed peace process (on the back of his criminal invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan) and Sharon was bulldozing his way through the Palestinian Territories with his Apartheid Wall. Professor Pappe wrote a devastatingly insightful article entitled: "The Palestine Peace Process: Unlearned Lessons of History". This article echoed the failures of all the previous peace processes since Oslo, but, predictably, all later peace processes launched since his article was written. A lot of processes, it seems, and no peace.

In his article, professor Pappe, with the vision of a sharp historian, warned that 'unless the US can now begin to pay attention to the lessons of history [read 1948], this new round of peace talks will not only end in failure, but the hopes currently aroused will turn once again into despair, fury and a renewed wave of violence and devastation'. We now know what happened to Bush and to his peace process.

Palestinian holds key and certirficate of registration from his original home during a Nakba rally in the West Bank city of Nablus; May 14, 2009.

Fast forward to the present day, November 2010, (twelve and a half years after the Paris meeting), and we have Benjamin Netanyahu again as Prime Minister, the illegal occupation of the OPT still continues with even more devastation across the whole landscape of Palestine, the Israeli military machine is pumped up by more nuclear arsenals and (hold your breath again) a new peace process launched by Barak Obama, the U.S President riding high (at the time of his election) on the biggest public support of any previous American president. Yet, no sooner had Obama's peace process been launched than the quick sands of the Middle East began to swallow it without mercy. Across the Palestinian landscape, and especially in occupied East Jerusalem, more demolition of Palestinian homes, more confiscation of farms, olive groves and more outright property theft of private houses by right-wing Zionist settlers under the protection of Israeli law and its military machine take place as the international community watches helplessly.

What does this all show?

It confirms what we have always believed: that the Zionist project of occupying and holding on to all of historic Palestine was, is and continues to be the prime and sole objective of the Zionist leadership in Israel. For this to happen and in an effort to smooth the path infront of such a colonial juggernaut, Israeli media has been put to sleep and the Israeli military leadership was made the only news outlet spurting out the sanitized version of the news to an indifferent Israeli public.

Since the Paris meeting and since professor Pappe's prophetic article, the only bright light shining out of Israel (and now out of the UK) remains professor Pappe's consistent and brave call for a debate on the 1948 Nakba. The other 'new historians' who met in Paris, remain mysteriously silent and surprisingly elusive about this issue.

It is clear to the informed reader and observer of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict that nothing will move on any future process to achieve a just and lasting peace in historic Palestine unless the 1948 Nakba, the Return of the Palestinian Refugees and rule of International Law have been embraced and made the basis for the next peace process.

Finally, it is also clear that the Zionist leaders occupying the Israeli Knesset have now become aware that their colonial juggernaut is running out of fuel. So, in order to pump more colonial life into it, they have come up with the racist "Oath to the Jewish Nation". Its twin tank has been filled with the illegal call to punish all those who commemorate the 1948 Nakba.

A new mirage or a new reality?

* Antoine Raffoul is a Palestinian architect living and practising in London. He was born in Nazareth and was expelled with his family from Haifa in April 1948. He is the Founder and Co-ordinator of 1948: Lest.We.Forget. a campaign group for truth about Palestine. He can be reached at info@1948.org.uk.

Related posts:

• Israeli Historian Ilan Pappe and ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’
• Palestine/Israel History since 1878
• Today in History: Hebron Massacre – 1994

The decline in Israel’s reputation since the brutal attack on the Gaza flotilla is unlikely to influence the country’s leaders

By Ilan Pappé* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

At the top of Israel’s political and military systems stand two men, Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, who are behind the brutal attack on the Gaza flotilla that shocked the world but that seemed to be hailed as a pure act of self-defence by the Israeli public.

Although they come from the left (Defence minister Barak from the Labour Party) and the right (Prime Minister Netanyahu from Likkud) of Israeli politics, their thinking on Gaza in general and on the flotilla in particular is informed by the same history and identical worldview.

At one time, Ehud Barak was Benjamin Netanyahu’s commanding officer in the Israeli equivalent of the SAS. More precisely, they served in a similar unit to the one sent to assault the Turkish ship last week. Their perception of the reality in the Gaza Strip is shared by other leading members of the Israeli political and military elite, and is widely supported by the Jewish electorate at home.

And it is a simple take on reality. Hamas, although the only government in the Arab world elected democratically by the people, has to be eliminated as a political as well as a military force. This is not only because it continues the struggle against the 40-year Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by launching primitive missiles into Israel – more often than not in retaliation to an Israel killing of its activists in the West Bank. But it is mainly due to its political opposition for the kind of “peace” Israel wants to impose on the Palestinians.

The forced peace is not negotiable as far as the Israeli political elite is concerned, and it offers the Palestinians a limited control and sovereignty in the Gaza Strip and in parts of the West Bank. The Palestinians are asked to give up their struggle for self-determination and liberation in return for the establishment of three small Bantustans under tight Israeli control and supervision.

The official thinking in Israel, therefore, is that Hamas is a formidable obstacle for the imposition of such a peace. And thus the declared strategy is straightforward: starving and strangulating into submission the 1.5 million Palestinians living in the densest space in the world.

The blockade imposed in 2006 is supposed to lead the Gazans to replace the current Palestinian government with one which would accept Israel’s dictate – or at least would be part of the more dormant Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. In the meantime,Hamas captured an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, and so the blockade became tighter. It included a ban of the most elementary commodities without which human beings find it difficult to survive. For want of food and medicine, for want of cement and petrol, the people of Gaza live in conditions that international bodies and agencies described as catastrophic and criminal.

As in the case of the flotilla, there are alternative ways for releasing the captive soldier, such as swapping the thousands of political prisons Israel is holding with Shalit. Many of them are children, and quite a few are being held without trial. The Israelis have dragged their feet in negotiations over such a swap, which are not likely to bear fruit in the foreseeable future.

But Barak and Netanyahu, and those around them, know too well that the blockade on Gaza is not going to produce any change in the position of the Hamas and one should give credit to the Prime Minister, David Cameron, who remarked at Prime Minister’s Questions last week that the Israelis’ policy, in fact, strengthens, rather than weakens, the Hamas hold on Gaza. But this strategy, despite its declared aim, is not meant to succeed or at least no one is worried in Jerusalem if it continues to be fruitless and futile.

One would have thought that Israel’s drastic decline in international reputation would prompt new thinking by its leaders. But the responses to the attack on the flotilla in the past few days indicate clearly that there is no hope for any significant shift in the official position. A firm commitment to continue the blockade, and a heroes’ welcome to the soldiers who pirated the ship in the Mediterranean, show that the same politics would continue for a long time.

This is not surprising. The Barak-Netanyahu-Avigdor Lieberman government does not know any other way of responding to the reality in Palestine and Israel. The use of brutal force to impose your will and a hectic propaganda machine that describes it as self-defence, while demonising the half-starved people in Gaza and those who come to their aid as terrorists, is the only possible course for these politicians. The terrible consequences in human death and suffering of this determination do not concern them, nor does international condemnation.

The real, unlike the declared, strategy is to continue this state of affairs. As long as the international community is complacent, the Arab world impotent and Gaza contained, Israel can still have a thriving economy and an electorate that regards the dominance of the army in its life, the continued conflict and the oppression of the Palestinians as the exclusive past, the present and future reality of life in Israel. The US vice-president Joe Biden was humiliated by the Israelis recently when they announced the building of 1,600 new homes in the disputed Ramat Shlomo district of Jerusalem, on the day he arrived to try to freeze the settlement policy. But his unconditional support now for the latest Israeli action makes the leaders and their electorate feel vindicated.

It would be wrong, however, to assume that American support and a feeble European response to Israeli criminal policies such as one pursued in Gaza are the main reasons for the protracted blockade and strangulation of Gaza. What is probably most difficult to explain to readers around the world is how deeply these perceptions and attitudes are grounded in the Israeli psyche and mentality. And it is indeed difficult to comprehend how diametrically opposed are the common reactions in the UK, for instance, to such events to the emotions that it triggers inside the Israeli Jewish society.

The international response is based on the assumption that more forthcoming Palestinian concessions and a continued dialogue with the Israeli political elite will produce a new reality on the ground. The official discourse in the West is that a very reasonable and attainable solution is just around the corner if all sides would make one final effort: the two-state solution.

Nothing is further from the truth than this optimistic scenario. The only version of this solution that is acceptable to Israel is the one that both the tamed Palestine Authority in Ramallah and the more assertive Hamas in Gaza could never ever accept. It is an offer to imprison the Palestinians in stateless enclaves in return for ending their struggle.

Thus even before one discusses either an alternative solution – a single democratic state for all, which I support – or explores a more plausible, two-state settlement, one has to transform fundamentally the Israeli official and public mindset. This mentality is the principal barrier to a peaceful reconciliation in the torn land of Israel and Palestine.

* Professor Ilan Pappé directs the European Centre for Palestine Studies at Exeter University and is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Source: www.independent.co.uk

Related posts:

• Israeli Historian Ilan Pappe and ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’
• Ilan Pappe – Israel’s righteous fury and its victims in Gaza
• The History of Israel Reconsidered: A Talk by Ilan Pappe

By William A. Cook* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Eliahu Epstein letter to President Harry S. Truman, May 14, 1948

As Israel attempts today to gloss over the reality of its birth 62 years ago with a sweeping public relations campaign extolling the miraculous "resurrection" of ancient Zion in contemporary times, a new nation seeking only peace with its neighbors, it might be enlightening and valuable to examine the truth.

On May 14, 1948 President Harry S. Truman received a letter from the Jewish Agency for Palestine announcing the impending proclamation of the independent republic of Israel (Harry S. Truman Library, document filed August 22, 1949).[i] That date marks not only the beginning of the State of Israel but, sub missa voce, the assumption by the State of Israel of the calculated, systematic and determined ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population of the land of Palestine that had been the business of "The Consultancy" and its agents before May 14, as identified by Dr. Ilan Pappe in his monumental The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.[ii]

The letter notes that the republic has been established within "frontiers approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations in its Resolution of November 29, 1947, and that a provisional government has been charged to assume the rights and duties of government for preserving law and order within the boundaries of Israel, for defending the state against external aggression, and for discharging the obligations of Israel to the other nations of the world in accordance with international law." The letter was signed by Eliahu Epstein, Agent, Provisional Government of Israel.

The letter is notable not for what it announces, but for what it does not reveal. Truth requires revelation of all the facts, not concealment by omission of that which would prejudice an understanding. During the six months between the adoption of UN Resolution 181 and the date of this letter, and in subsequent months, the prospective state of Israel launched a massive military incursion into territory designated by that same Resolution for the Palestinian people, creating in its wake "three quarters of a million Palestinian refugees," the destruction of "hundreds of entire villages ... not only depopulated but obliterated ...and houses blown up or bulldozed" (Walid Khalidi, All That Remains, xv).[iii] Khalidi's massive study focuses on 418 villages, once the homes of Palestinians, 292 completely destroyed, 90 others "largely destroyed," the remainder re-inhabited by Jews called Israeli settlers.

In blunt terms, the Jewish Agency for Palestine lied to the American President that it had established a provisional government that "has been charged to assume the rights and duties ... for preserving law and order within the boundaries of Israel ... and for discharging the obligations of Israel to the other nations of the world in accordance with international law."

The Agency's deception made no reference either to the President or the international community that it had created the "Catastrophe," or as the Palestinians termed it, the Nakba, the days of infamy that created what has become the largest Diaspora of refugees in the world and a time of remembrance for those killed in a series of massacres, estimated at 24 by Benny Morris, Israel's preeminent Historian of that period. Indeed, the Agency had acted against international law in invading Palestinian land as designated by the very Resolution that had given them the right to a state of Israel even as it lied without remorse to the international community that it would live in accordance with their laws.

This letter, coupled with an earlier one to the President, dated May 10, 1948, will serve as a microcosm of political deceit characteristic of the Zionist led forces that controlled the nascent state of Israel. This second letter from The Nation Associates, notified the President that

Tomorrow morning the Washington Post will carry, in the form of a full-age (sic) advertisement, the text of an open letter to you requesting the implementation of the November 29 resolution on Palestine...I have been requested to send you the enclosed text of this open letter by the signators ...It is our hope that in the week which remains before the end of the British Mandate, action will be taken by you to insure the recognition of the Jewish state as a means of maintaining the prestige of this country, the authority of the United Nations, and peace in the Middle East (Signed by Freda Kirchwey, President; document available at the Truman Library).[iv]

The Nation Associates supported the establishment of the State of Israel and used its publishing arm to further that goal. The "Open Letter" referred to above argued against the moves by "the British and our own State Department" to "sabotage" the partition resolution despite the President's determined effort to support Israel. Indeed, the Associates went so far as to publish "The British Record on Partition" published in The Nation, America's Leading Liberal Weekly, on May 8, 1948 detailing their selected reading of "British Military Intelligence Sources." This document was simultaneously submitted to the Special Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations. The Open letter published in the Washington Post amounted to a synopsis of this larger document including its primary argument that "there was no reason why the Jewish state could not be set up (if the Arabs resisted partition) and the Arab area turned over to the Trusteeship Council." Note that this argument is being made even as the Jewish Agency and its affiliates have driven hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and villages and massacred untold thousands in the area designated for the Palestinians recommended to be turned over to the Trusteeship Council.

The open letter cited an amendment to the resolution inserted by Truman's representative, Herschel Johnson, "the Security Council should determine as a threat to peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, in accordance with Article 29 of the Charter,any attempt to alter by force the settlement envisaged by this resolution." Yet no mention is made here of the invasion by the Jewish forces of the towns and villages in the area designated for the Palestinians. Rather, the Associates allege that it is the British Mandate government that has supported the Arab League against Israel since 1945, "under the direction of Foreign Minister Bevin, {who} (has) resisted every American proposal for a decent settlement of the Palestinian question." "This was true," the letter continues, "in 1946 when he refused to accept the proposal of the Anglo-American Committee and your own, for the admission into Palestine of 100,000 Jews." What is left unsaid by the Associates is the British promise to the Arabs in the Balfour Declaration that they would maintain a strict ratio of Jews entering Palestine to the indigenous population, the second of the Balfour Declaration promises never referenced as the companion piece to the establishment of a home for the Jews in Palestine.[v]

So now we see the strategy of the Zionists as they manipulate the President: (a) advance publication of a major document detailing British subterfuge in eroding the possibility of establishing a Jewish state sent to the United Nations, thereby placing blame for the deterioration of conditions in Palestine on the British; (b) a subsequent letter to the President informing him that a public "open letter" will be published in the Washington Post detailing subversion of the Jewish people, placing him in the unenviable position of not aiding the "victims" of this subversion or carrying through with recognition of the Jewish state "as a means of maintaining the prestige of this country"; (c) and, finally, another letter, this from the Jewish Agency for Palestine, on the 14^th, seeking his recognition by "welcoming Israel into the community of nations" with no reference to the breaching of international law by the very Agency seeking his support.

Control and manipulation of the events coming out of Palestine has been and continues to be the modus operandi of the Zionist leaders of the state of Israel. The above letters to President Truman offer insight into this manipulation. Moreover, Truman was acting on behalf of the American people in recognizing the State of Israel on the 15^th of May 1948. What the American people knew was the suffering of the Jews under Hitler and the apparent logic of the United Nations partition plan to provide a state for the two peoples residing in Palestine. What they did not know was the Zionist entity that had different goals and the will to deceive the citizens of America to achieve them. But the American people were not alone in being deceived. More importantly is the deception kept from the British people about these "disappeared years," as Robert Fisk terms them. What's missing is the perspective of the Palestinians and the British Mandate government.

The United Kingdom had mandatory authority from the League of Nations to govern the area with the establishment of the Palestine Mandate in 1922, an action that imposed a western colonial and national mindset on an area familiar with tribal and imperial authority. Prior to the official implementation of the Mandate, the British Government had enunciated a "declaration" concerning the desirability of His Majesty's Government in the "establishment of a national home for the Jewish people," called the Balfour Declaration.

Discussions that resulted in the final text of the Balfour Declaration clarify the intention of its wording. The use of "national home" was used intentionally instead of "state." Additionally, the first draft of the declaration referred to the principle "that Palestine should be reconstituted as the National Home of the Jewish people." In the final text, the word that was replaced with in to avoid committing all of Palestine to the Jews only.[vi]

Between 1939 and 1947, the mandate Government found it more and more difficult to maintain its position as the responsible governing force servicing the Arab population and the growing Jewish population, determining by 1947 that these two populations could not coexist. As a result, the British Government placed the resolution of the problem in the hands of the United Nations. That in turn resulted in a partition plan of the land of Palestine, proposed in November of 1947 to the General Assembly, to be implemented in May of 1948, sixty two years ago this May.

British authority in Palestine continued under the United Nations until the implementation of the Partition Plan in May 1948. Consequently, the mandate government had to abide by the Charter of the UN and its Conventions. Ironically, as the Zionist forces, estimated by the Jewish Agency personnel in documents seized by the Mandate Police at 20 to 60 thousand (see top secret file of Sir Richard C. Catling, The Plight of the Palestinians), continued their massacres of Palestinians into 1948, the UN debated the adoption of a Convention defining "genocide" based on Nuremberg principles, a definition approved that same year.

In 1944 the term "genocide" appeared in Raphael Lemkin's Axis Rule in Occupied Europe created out of the conditions that allowed for the Nazi action against those suffering in their concentration camps. Therefore once the State of Israel was created by the Jewish leaders of the area by declaration May 14, 1948, and, subsequently, was recognized for membership in the UN in 1949, it was expected to abide by the UN Conventions. The United Nations does not appropriate to itself the authority to create states. The United Nations only authorizes itself to recognize states for membership, states that are formed or proclaimed by the people of said state.[vii]

What should be obvious now, after the carefully researched and scholarly work of Dr. Ilan Pappe in his Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and the equally well-researched work of Dr. Benny Morris in his Righteous Victims, both based on recently released evidence from the Israeli archives and those of the Israel Defense Forces Archives, complemented now with the materials preserved by Sir Richard C. Catling, to be made available in The Plight of the Palestinians from Palgrave Macmillan in June, is the truth about the creation of the state of Israel: acceptance of UN Resolution 181 by the Jewish Agency Provisional Government as the designated Jewish state was not done with intent to abide by the goal of the UN General Assembly, to provide a state for two peoples in the land of Palestine, but rather to use it as a means of subterfuge to gain eventual control of all the land and cleanse that land of its indigenous people to whatever extent possible. Put bluntly, what was true then is true today; the current government in Israel continues the practices of past Israeli governments, cleanse the land of its rightful inhabitants to make that land part of the Jewish state. This is what is termed, "slow motion genocide," not, one would hope, a civilized policy to be extolled either by the Israelis or the international community.

This essay is a modification of the opening chapter of William A. Cook latest book, "The Plight of the Palestinians: A Long History of Destruction", to be issued by Palgrave Macmillan in June.

* William A. Cook is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California and author of The Rape Of Palestine: Hope Destroyed, Justice Denied, Tracking Deception: Bush Mid-East Policy and The Chronicles Of Nefaria. He can be reached at: wcook@laverne.edu.
www.drwilliamacook.com

NOTES:

[i] Eptstein, Eliahu. (1948). Agent, Provisional Government of Israel. Letter to President Harry S. Truman. May 14, 1948. Filed August 22, 1949. Truman Library. www.trumanlibrary.org/whistelstop/study_collections/Israel/large/documents/index. 12/15/2008.

[ii] Pappe, Ilan. (2006). The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld: Oxford.

[iii] Khalidi, Walid. (1992). All That Remains. Institute for Palestinian Studies: Washington, D.C. xv.

[iv] Kirchwey, Freda. (1948). President, The Nation Associates. Letter to President Harry S. Truman. May 10, 1948. Filed May 11, 1948. Truman Library.

[v] Prior, Michael. (1999) Zionism and the State of Israel: A Moral Inquiry. London: Rutledge.

[vi] Stein, Leonard. (1961). The Balfour Declaration. New York: Simon and Shuster, 470.

[vii] Harb, Jim. (2009). "The UN did not create Israel."

www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2009/04/what-theun-did-not-create-israel.html. 6-11-2009.

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Alan Hart Interviews Professor Ilan Pappe, Israel's leading "new" or "revisionist" historian.

Like all Israelis, Ilan was brought up, conditioned, to believe Zionism's version of the history of the making and sustaining of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It wasn't until he went to England to continue his academic studies that he had access to documentation which enabled him to understand that Zionism's version is a propaganda lie.

Part 1:

Part 2:

* Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent who covered wars and conflicts wherever they were taking place in the world and specialized in the Middle East. Author of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews: The False Messiah (Zionism, the Real Enemy of the Jews). He blogs on www.alanhart.net and tweets on www.twitter.com/alanauthor

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1. What 'Israel's right to exist' means to Palestinians
By John V. Whitbeck (Source: The Christian Science Monitor)

"Recognizing Israel" or any other state is a formal legal and diplomatic act by one state with respect to another state. It is inappropriate – indeed, nonsensical – to talk about a political party or movement extending diplomatic recognition to a state. To talk of Hamas "recognizing Israel" is simply to use sloppy, confusing, and deceptive shorthand for the real demand being made of the Palestinians.

"Recognizing Israel's existence" appears on first impression to involve a relatively straightforward acknowledgment of a fact of life. Yet there are serious practical problems with this language. What Israel, within what borders, is involved? Is it the 55 percent of historical Palestine recommended for a Jewish state by the UN General Assembly in 1947? The 78 percent of historical Palestine occupied by the Zionist movement in 1948 and now viewed by most of the world as "Israel" or "Israel proper"? The 100 percent of historical Palestine occupied by Israel since June 1967 and shown as "Israel" (without any "Green Line") on maps in Israeli schoolbooks?

Israel has never defined its own borders, since doing so would necessarily place limits on them. Still, if this were all that was being demanded of Hamas, it might be possible for the ruling political party to acknowledge, as a fact of life, that a state of Israel exists today within some specified borders. Indeed, Hamas leadership has effectively done so in recent weeks.
Read full article...

2. One state solution not abortive and dangerous illusions - Answer to Uri Avnery
By: Ilan Pappe (Source: hagada.org.il)

The facts on the ground are crystal clear: the two states' solution has dismally failed and we have no spare time to waste in a futile anticipation of another illusory round of diplomatic efforts that would lead to nowhere. As Avnery admits, the Israeli peace camp has failed, so far, to persuade the Israeli Jewish society to try the road of peace. A sober and critical assessment of this camp's size and force leads to the inevitable conclusion that it has no chance what so ever against the prevailing trends in the Israeli Jewish society. It is doubtful whether it will even keep its very minimal presence on the ground, and there is a great concern it will disappear all together.

Avnery ignores these facts and alleges that the One State Solution is a dangerous panacea to offer to the critically ill patient. All right, so let us prescribe it gradually, but for God's sake let us remove the patient from the very dangerous medicine we have been forcing down his throat for the last sixty years and which is about to kill him.
Read full article...

3. Polite discussion on Zionism: Is it possible?
By Karin Friedemann (Source: thepeoplesvoice.org)

Progressive Jews want to make the bottom line "Jews are nice people." But that is not the bottom line. As Hillel mentioned, the bottom line is that you don't do to others what you don't want others to do to you. What would we expect if our neighbor, with or without warning, bulldozed our house?

First, we would call the police. If the man with the bulldozer failed to stop bulldozing the house, the police officer would have the duty to disable the vehicle and he might even shoot him. I'm talking about American law. The bulldozer man would be stopped. He would be considered a criminal. He would be put on trial. He would go to prison. If he had killed people in the process of bulldozing the house, he might even be executed. The owner of the house that was bulldozed would be entitled to damages plus extra for pain and suffering. The law requires that his property be restored to the original state that it was in. That includes replanting the trees and fixing the pavement around the house.
Read full article...

4. Don't call it discrimination
By Nimer Sultany (Source: commentisfree.guardian)

Imagine the following situation in the United States:

The US amends the constitution to define itself as a "White Evangelical and democratic state" and leaves "equal protection of the laws" outside the constitution; a federal organ called the White Evangelical National Fund promotes settlement and allocation of land for White Evangelicals only; a federal organ called White Evangelical Agency encourages and helps White Evangelicals all over the world to immigrate to the US since it is the Promised Land for Whites; a federally-funded Center for Demography working to increase the birthrates of White Evangelicals to ensure their status as a majority and discusses ways to "persuade" non-white citizens to have less children; a federal Immigration and Absorption Department dedicated exclusively for White Evangelicals; a law prohibiting mixed marriages inside the US between American citizens and non-White-Evangelical foreigners (the Supreme Court upholds the law since Earl Warren is no longer on the bench); an immigration law providing automatic citizenship and financial government benefits for White Evangelicals only; the administration declares most of the private lands as public domain owned collectively by white people, and non-whites are denied any rights in these lands; the president appoints a Chief Evangelical Priest for the US, the administration funds his office as well as dozens of White Evangelical religious schools and institutions, and the Congress starts its session after the elections by reading Biblical verses; the head of the FBI publicly states that non-white citizens are "strategic threat" and "demographic threat" to the White Evangelical character of the country; some members of the Congress publicly and routinely demand the expulsion of the non-white citizens; 65% of the white majority regularly expresses in public opinion polls its demand from the administration to encourage the emigration of non-whites outside the country; and 60 years of constant official state of emergency with Emergency Regulations invoked occasionally to prevent non-white leaders from leaving the country and to close their newspapers and NGOs.
Read full article...

5. Bushra's final exam
By Gideon Levy (Source: Ha'aretz)

The blood also spilled on her grammar workbook, staining it. Her green pen was also covered with blood; it's still there, amid the bloody pages. The grammar book of Bushra Bargis (Al-Wahsh), the study material of a girl who was preparing for the Magen pre-matriculation exam, her last exam. Among the pages of the workbook, which has become a kind of memorial book, the family has inserted the death picture: a twisted smile, eyes half-closed and a small hole in the forehead.

Bushra, 17, was killed by a sniper's bullet aimed at the middle of her forehead as she paced her room, grammar book in hand, memorizing the material for the exam the next day. A direct hit. The lights were on in the room, the shooter must have seen the person at whom he was firing, whose life he was taking with such dreadful ease.

A sniper's amusement? One bullet in a teenager's forehead and two bullets in the door of the refrigerator, which is in the new kitchen off of Bushra's room, a place where the females of the house hid: Ruqiya, her daughter Suqeina, 23, and Suqeina's three-year-old daughter, Dareen. Two women, a teenaged girl and a toddler in the house where the soldiers thought Abd al-Rahman Al-Wahsh, a wanted man and Bushra's brother, was hiding.
[...]
The blood-soaked carpet has been rolled up andtaken up to the roof and laid alongside the satellite dish. The house from which the sniper apparently shot and killed Bushra is visible across the way. A picture of Abdullah, the prisoner, hangs on the wall of the room in which his sister was killed. Her picture will be placed next to his. For now, a very large photo of Bushra, the girl who never made it to her exam on Sunday, rests in its frame.
Read full article...

6. Buying the War on Palestinians: The US Media, The New York Times and Israel
By Patrick O'Connor (Source: The Electronic Intifada)

Bill Moyers' April 25 PBS special Buying the War attempted to hold the mainstream US media accountable for its complicity in selling the war on Iraq to the US public. Moyers documented how the US media, with The New York Times in a leading role, bowed to financial and political pressure, succumbed to an environment of patriotism and fear of terrorism, and uncritically reported false US government claims. Tragically, despite the terrible consequences of 60 years of Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people, there is still no significant movement to hold the US mainstream media accountable for a similar, dramatic failure in covering Israel and Palestine, and for its complicity in the US' uncritical support for Israel...

Though Moyers did not, the neo-cons continually drew the link between Iraq and Israel, asserting that "the road to Jerusalem passes through Baghdad." And in Israel, the other major outpost in "the war on terror," racist ideology and politically tainted intelligence are also pushed by the government and credulously reported by US media outlets like The New York Times. For example, an 11 April 2007 Times news article by Isabel Kershner headlined unverifiable claims by Israel's Shin Bet (the equivalent of our FBI) that it had thwarted a massive Hamas suicide bombing planned for Passover. The article largely ignored Palestinian denials reported the same day in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. The Shin Bet claim seemed to merit skepticism in light of the Palestinian denials, and Hamas' decision two years ago to halt large-scale attacks.

Of the 1,085 Times news articles since 1 December 2004, 37 percent mentioned Palestinian "attack(s)," 36 percent mentioned "terrorism," 28 percent mentioned "terrorist(s)," 21 percent mentioned Palestinian "violence," 18 percent mentioned "suicide bombing(s)," 16 percent mentioned Palestinian "weapon(s)," and 14 percent mentioned Palestinian "radicals." In contrast to this strong Israeli narrative, only two words reflecting a Palestinian narrative appeared in a comparable percentage of Times' news articles. Israeli "settlement(s)" were noted in 32 percent of articles, and Israeli "occupation" was mentioned in 16 percent of articles. This imbalance is even more striking because the emphasis on Palestinian terrorism and violence corresponded with a two year and five month period during which Israelis killed 965 Palestinians, more than half civilians, while Palestinians killed 85 Israelis. Nonetheless, Israeli "attacks(s)" are mentioned in 13 percent of Times articles, and Israeli "violence" in only 4 percent.

A 22 April 2007 article by Isabel Kershner "Israel and Palestinians Trade Fire in Gaza and West Bank" noted in the opening sentence that: "A sharp escalation of Israeli-Palestinian violence in the West Bank and Gaza left up to six Palestinians dead and culminated in an Israeli airstrike into Gaza." Though six Palestinians were killed inside the West Bank and Gaza, with five deaths definitively attributed to the Israeli military, and no Israeli injuries reported, the article headlined an exchange of fire. Kershner's opening summary sentence did not attribute the "violence" or even escalation to Israel, nor did she use the word "attack" to describe Israeli actions. Even more peculiar, of the article's 851 total words, 524 words were devoted to describing a Palestinian "attack" on a private American School for Palestinians in Gaza during which the "attackers," "Islamic extremists" and "Islamic radicals" destroyed school property, but injured no one. Thus Israeli soldiers who killed six Palestinians, didn't "attack" and received less coverage than Palestinian "radicals" and "extremists" who "attacked," though they hurt no one.
Read full article...

[Cartoon Image by Benjamin Heine]

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This issue is one of the most intractable barrier to a Middle East peace settlement. Millions of Palestinian refugees will always fight for their right to return to their occupied lands and property that was occupied by Israel and now is called the State of Israel.

In the latest Doha Debate, this issue was discussed. The motion was: 'This House believes the Palestinians should give up their full right of return.'

Yossi Beilin, a Knesset member and Chairman of the Meretz-Yachad party, and Bassem Eid, a Palestinian human rights campaigner, argued for the motion. They were challenged by Israeli academic Ilan Pappe and Ali Abunimah, son of Palestinian refugees and co-founder of Electronic Intifada.com

In a final vote the Palestinian right of return was overwhelming supported with almost 82% of the audience rejecting the motion. The Debate toke place on March 28, 2007 and was broadcast on BBC World on the 14th and 15th of April.

Watch the debate while it's still available on google video:

[Cross posted at Daily Kos]

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From time to time, I receive some hate emails and comments from sick Zionist with the very infamous subject line: “Palestinian people do not exist.”

Just a while ago, one of these history denial comments were attempted to be posted here by someone calling himself Doron Zielinski. The spam comment was long enough and full of naive and unsupported lies that the Zionist like to spread all over. Of course there is no point in arguing with such ignorant people, specially that we know that their objective is not discussion, but spreading poison.

Never the less, this incident reminded me of a video interview I saw recently (although it goes back to 2002). In this interview, the Israeli famous historian Ilan Pappe talks about exactly the same subject: “Zionist denial of Palestinian ID and existence.” Therefore, I see this as a good opportunity to link to this video (unfortunately the video is not available for sharing).

This 45 min interview with leading Israel academic and “New Historian” Dr Ilan Pappe, videoed in Manchester in September 2002. Dr. Ilan Pappe is an Israeli historian at Haifa University who writes on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the history of the 1948 war. He was interviewed before addressing a public meeting and open debate at the University of Manchester. It is a ‘must see’ interview to learn more about the history of “Ethnic Cleansing” and “Nakbah (Catastrophe) Denial.”

Excerpts from the interview:

I think there are 3 main myths that inform mainstream Israeli Jewish society. A lot of them still believe, because that’s the way they have been educated, that Palestine had been empty when the Jewish settlers came there in the late 19th century. There is still a feeling there that basically the Palestinian inhabitants of Palestine are either a nuisance or newcomers, or irrelevant. They are an obstacle, but not people with rights or indigenous rights.

The second myth is more directly connected to 1948. Most Israeli Jews believe that the Palestinians left voluntarily in 1948. They are not aware, or do not want to be aware of the fact that an ethnic cleansing took place in 1948.

[…]

Going back to 1948 for a bit, could you give a little more detail of your own historical research.

A group of us are called the “New Historians”, those who revise and challenge the main Israeli version of 1948. We debunk several myths. The first myth is that Israel was fighting the whole of the Arab world in a kind of David and Goliath war. Although there was a lot of war rhetoric from the Arab side, very few Arab soldiers were sent into the battlefield, and actually for most of the war there was superiority on the side of the Israeli army. In fact one of the most important Arab armies, the Jordanian army, had colluded with the Israelis before the war to divide Palestine. So the first myth we undermine is the “few against many” - which is very important in the Israeli psyche, the Israeli mentality.

The second and most important myth is that the Palestinians left voluntarily. We found out that there was a systematic expulsion of Palestinians and an ethnic cleansing operation taking place. We also found there had been willingness on the Arab side in general and on the Palestinian side in particular, to conclude some sort of an agreement with the Jewish State after the war, and it was the Israeli intransigence and inflexible position that failed the peace efforts after the 1948 war.

The strategy was set out even well before 1948 with the Transfer Committee.

Yes. The Transfer Committee was part of the outfit in pre-1948 Palestine, that belonged to the Jewish Agency, to the Jewish leadership. And its main position was actually to evaluate the “quality” of the 500 - 600 Arab villages, i.e. to find out which village had fertile land, what was the wealth of each and each village. It was preparing for the day that Israel would take over these villages. And then, after the ethnic cleansing took place, it was renamed and became more like a distribution committee. It had to divide the spoils between the various Kibbutzim movements, and the various Jewish agencies that dealt with Settlement. And so it was an important official facet of the leadership. But it was all conceived by the leader of the Jewish Agency and later the first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion.

[…]

How was all of this covered up? If one of the myths was that this never happened, how could this be sustained?

It’s an interesting question! I still try to find my answers to that. One way was by creating an indoctrinating system of education, in which the people who perpetrated the ethnic cleansing cooperated. From the moment the war ended the people who fought in the war were also the people who wrote the history books of the war. And they already had a story they made up about what had happened, and that story was integrated into the Israeli education system, the media, the political discourse. And with the help of the launderette of words all kind of new words were invented to hide what had really happened on the ground. Because of the Holocaust it was easier for Israel to do it than for any other nation, I think. And it succeeded.

The second reason is that the Palestinians were under such a shock and trauma, that when they started to tell the story it was a bit too late. It was so many years after, that it was less relevant in the eyes of many good people in the world.

[…]

So that’s on one level. The second level is no less important, that there is what I call the “Nakbah Denial”, “Catastrophe Denial”. I think there is a similar “Holocaust Denial” on the Palestinian side, and I am a great believer that in order to further the chances of reconciliation, you have to have a kind of link, an association between the ability of the Israelis to stop denying the Nakbah, and the Palestinians accepting that the Holocaust plays a role in the life of Jews in Israel, and the life of Jews everywhere. I’m not inventing the wheel, this was first mentioned by Edward Said in his book “The Dispossession of the Palestinians”, but I think it’s a good idea. That we are all there victims also of the Holocaust, not only of what we are doing to each other.

Does it cause ripples in Israeli society now when people see these things?

Oh no, unfortunately not. No the Israeli society is still numb, and very indifferent. We have a national singer who was appalled when she saw that, Yaffa Yarkoni, probably The National Singer, and she’s boycotted ever since she dared to say that it reminded her of Nazi Germany. No no, in a way it’s a non-starter in Israeli political debates, you’re not allowed to do this. I think you should, but you’re not allowed to. No unfortunately there is no sensitivity in the Israeli Jewish society. On the contrary I think the major thing that Israelis are doing now is blaming anyone who criticises them of being pro-Nazi, at worst, or someone who doesn’t understand the Holocaust, at best.

You yourself have also suffered some victimisation.

Well I suffer it in 3 levels. One is that I’ve written several books in English, but they are not translated into Hebrew, so this is a kind of boycott of books which goes on. The second one is the more sort of personal intimidation through the phone and letters, and so on. And the third one is sort of the climax of this whole campaign, there was an attempt to expel me from my University in May 2002. And it was difficult because I have tenure, I have a permanent position at the University. It was a legal procedure that has been suspended, because of international pressure.

The concrete reasons for the last phase was that I protected a student, not my student but someone I know very well, who in his MA dissertation revealed that there was a massacre in the village of Tantura in the 1948 war, one of the worst massacres in that war. And although he received the highest grade possible for his excellent thesis, because the veterans of the Unit that he accused of perpetrating the massacre sued him in court, the University changed its attitude. He is being disqualified and robbed of his title. And I accused the University of certain things because of that, and because of these public accusations I was myself brought to trial, which can still be resumed next academic year.

[…]

Download a full transcript of this interview (PDF File).

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Listen to more information about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 in these two lectures (sound files) of the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, who did extensive research in the military archives of Israel. [Hat tip: Stan van Houcke]

On January 26, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe gave a lecture at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Pappe was in the Netherlands on invitation of United Civilians for Peace and Another Jewish Voice. On January 27 he presented his latest book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” in ABC Treehouse Gallery and On January 28, he lectured at Desmet in Amsterdam.

Download his lecture here: Part 1 (MP3) | Part 2 (MP3)

Pappe’s book shows that in 1948, the Zionist movement waged a war against the Palestinian people in order to implement its long term plans of ethnic cleansing. The Arab world tried to prevent this cleansing, but was too fragmented, self-centered and ineffective to stop the uprooting of half of Palestine’s native population, the destruction of half of its villages and towns and the killing of thousands of its people.

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Is Israel guilty of ethnic cleansing? Dr Ilan Pappe, called by some as the "most hated Jew in Israel", says YES. But fellow Israeli Professor Efraim Karsh says he is "fabricating history". Ilan Pappe in debate with fellow Israeli Professor Efraim Karsh on Sky News:

Fabricating history? Does this so called Professor have a brain? What are all these millions of refugees all around the world? Where did hundreds of villages disappear? Am I fabricated? Me, myself, fabricated? An fabricated uprooted Palestinian... heh... good one. Can I go home now, Zionist friends?

Ilan Pappe addresses the Palestine-Israel conflict and links the ethnic cleansing of 1948 to prospects for a lasting peace in the region in his new book, "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" (to be published by Oneworld Publications, November 2006).

As Israel stands accused by Amnesty International of committing war crimes in Lebanon following its almost 5-week bombardment of that country, which left over a thousand civilians dead and almost a million displaced, a prominent Israeli historian at HaifaUniversity revisits the formative period of the State of Israel to investigate the treatment of the indigenous Palestinians.

In his controversial new book, "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine," Ilan Pappe investigates the fate suffered by the indigenous population of 1940s Palestine at the hands of the Zionist political and military leadership. During this period, around a million people were expelled from their own country at gunpoint, civilians were massacred, and over 400 Palestinian villages deliberately destroyed. Denied for almost six decades, had it happened today it could only have been called "ethnic cleansing."

With meticulous research, and drawing heavily on recently declassified military archives and cabinet meeting minutes, as well as the diaries and memoirs of the key players, Pappe methodically reconstructs the strategic planning and military operations during the British Mandate and the run-up to independence. He goes on to offer a detailed account of the events of 1947-8 as they unfolded, which eventually led to one of the biggest refugee migrations in modern history.

This is no moral rant against the past, but a passionate plea to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 as the root cause of the ongoing Palestine-Israel conflict. Pappe argues persuasively that the consequent dispossession of a million native Palestinians from their homeland, and the continued denial of their right of return, constitute an abuse of international human rights, which he decisively links to Middle East politics today, and the prospects for a lasting peace in the country and, therefore, in the region. [Source]

More on the book here.

Support this brave man, republish this and buy his book.

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Oxford University is this week holding an "Israeli Apartheid week." Hosted by the Palestinian Society, flyers state it is to commemorate the "30th anniversary of the international convention on the suppression and punishment of the crime of apartheid."

Ilan Pappe from Haifa University, an advocate of a one-state solution and boycott of Israeli institutions, will speak on "Resisting Apartheid: Divestment and Solidarity" on Friday. Chairing the meeting is Prof. Steven Rose, a major supporter of an academic and cultural boycott of Israel.

Other speakers include Prof. Gabi Piterberg from University of California at Los Angeles, who spoke on Monday night on "Zionism and Apartheid." Piterberg, an Israeli anti-Zionist, added his signature to a petition in 2003 calling for divestment from Israel.

Karma Nabulsi, a politics fellow at Oxford and former PLO representative, will talk about "Palestinian Resistance." In a recent article, Dr. Nabulsi's accused Britain and Europe of "funding Israel's occupation and expansion."

On Tuesday night participants saw a film about an Israeli activist who married a Palestinian and founded a theater group in Jenin, where she taught children to express anger, bitterness and fear through acting and art.

"Arna's Children" recounts the story of her son returning to Jenin, after Arna's death, to find out what happened to the children.

Jewish students voiced their concern by writing to the university's vice chancellor. Karen Bagan, co-president of the Jewish Society, said:

"If it had been a Palestinian awareness week, people would have been excited, but this simply is a direct attack on Israel and says they don't want dialogue." Last month Oxford University Jewish Society held an "Israel awareness week" that included events such as the "Israeli-Palestinian bereaved families for peace" forum.

Jewish students were told that while their concerns were understood, there was insufficient evidence for them to intervene as "there needs to be a high level of provocation."

A spokesperson for the University of Oxford said in a statement, "A number of events are being held by an unofficial student society this week. The proctors have considered the complaints, from students and others, in the context of the University's Code of Practice on the Freedom of Speech, which allows the free expression of opinions within the law, and have seen no evidence that there has been a breach of the code."

Abdel Razzaq Takriti, media spokesman for the Palestinian Society, said:

"We are simply stating our belief and explaining that Israel is an apartheid state, to encourage people to take a stance and increase public pressure on Israel to change its apartheid policies."

[source: JPost]

I'm surprised that every time a Palestinian tries to educate the world what is going on his occupied land, the Jews jump in and call that inflammatory, and wonders why Palestinians don't open dialogue. Of course this is smart at their side, but if talking about Palestine and Palestinians under the occupation is inflammatory, then what do we call the Israeli crimes?

Yes, we want to build bridges and we want to engage in dialogue, but the problem is that Israel keeps on bombing the bridges, and claiming that they have no peace-partner.

Unless and until the world knows who is the occupier and who is occupied and what does the occupation look like; I don't expect the world to place pressure on Israel. Also, our Israeli friends should be reminded that "you make peace with your enemy, not with your friend." Therefore, if you are really looking for just-lasting peace, stop calling Hamas names that will lead you nowhere but miss again and again, a new chance for peace.

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