Isolate Apartheid Israel – Cut Diplomatic Ties

By Roshan Dadoo• 24 May 2018 from the Daily Maverick

 A reply to Malcolm Ferguson’s Op-Ed in Daily Maverick, 21 May 2018.

The targeted shooting of peaceful protesters in Gaza by the Israeli Defence Force that left around 60 people dead and many hundreds wounded on 14 May 2018 has been seen by the world for what it is – a coldblooded massacre.

Malcolm Ferguson praises the South African government for taking the step of recalling our ambassador from Tel Aviv in response to this slaughter. However, the main objective of his opinion piece is to discredit ANC policy and government statements to downgrade the South African Embassy in Tel Aviv and he simply cannot contain his disdain for a foreign policy that takes action in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Ferguson addresses South African Zionists, seeking to bring them closer to government so they might strengthen their influence on government policy. He does so by arguing that it is better not to criticise, but rather to welcome the recall of our ambassador in order to constrain the South African government from taking more substantial action against Israel.

Given that the majority of South Africans support the ambassadorial recall following the Gaza massacre (80% according to a poll Ferguson refers to), he cautions that Jewish institutions and individuals might come under attack from unidentified “extremists” if the government does not take this action at the very least. Raising the spectral figure of “extremists” in South Africa is a disingenuous attempt to punt his position and play on the fears of anti-Semitism. It is tainted with racism, as the only possibility for Ferguson is that extremism comes from the Palestinian side.

He then attempts to ingratiate himself with the current South African administration, flattering Minister Lindiwe Sisulu and President Cyril Ramaphosa as so much more “reasonable” and “informed” than the Zuma-led government. He is trying to discourage them from taking any further sanction against Israel, which would make them “unreasonable” and by implication populist, like Zuma.

However, the ANC resolution, passed at the December 2017 Conference, calls for “an immediate and unconditional downgrade”. Ferguson does not consider that while this resolution was tabled during the Zuma ANC presidency it was unanimously adopted, even by Ramaphosa supporters, and is stated in the closing Conference Declaration following the election of President Ramaphosa. Indeed, Minister Naledi Pandor, in the debate following State President Ramaphosa’s SONA address in February, went further and said that South Africa will “cut diplomatic ties” with Israel. President Ramaphosa has subsequently, on more than one occasion, reminded South Africans of the downgrade resolution as a matter that government has to deal with.

Ferguson also addresses himself to ANC supporters and officials, arguing that maintaining diplomatic relations with Israel will make us a serious player in the “Palestinian-Israeli problem”.

First, the “problem” is that Israel is a colonial state that has refused to fulfil any of the UN resolutions since 1948 or its commitments under the 1993 Oslo Peace Process that was supposed to have led to a two-state solution.

Second, he argues that if we cut ties with Israel they will not allow us to operate our diplomatic mission in the West Bank, which only goes to show exactly how Israel holds total control of the Palestinian territories. It is also questionable given that both Venezuela and Bolivia cut diplomatic relations with Israel but maintain their Ramallah missions. Furthermore, it would be a signal to the international community of South Africa’s weakness if we countenanced this consideration.

Third, we cannot be held to ransom over a seat at the UN Security Council when other countries that do not have diplomatic relations – or do not even recognise the state of Israel – have held such seats. Currently Bolivia and Kuwait have non-permanent seats and do not have diplomatic relations with Israel.

Fourth, why should the fact that some of Israel’s neighbours have diplomatic relations influence our foreign policy? Our foreign policy, as Minister Sisulu has argued, should be based on our values and principles as a country – irrespective of whether “neighbouring states” have the same values or not. Indeed, “neighbours” such as Jordan and Egypt are not democratic states, and our foreign policy should not be influenced by dictatorships.

The crux of the matter is that Ferguson has always considered it “futile” for South African diplomacy to act in solidarity with the Palestinian people. I worked with him in the early 2000s when he was Chief Director: Middle East in the then Department of Foreign Affairs. At that time he was most concerned with ensuring that there was no trade or diplomatic break with Israel, in spite of acts of Israeli violence against the institutions of the Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank, the infrastructure in Gaza and, of course, the Palestinian people.

Although we held a number of engagements that brought together senior Palestinian and Israeli negotiators among others, such as the Spier process, it was increasingly evident that Israel had no interest in moving towards genuine negotiations on the final status issues to create two states as envisaged under the Oslo Peace Process. Israel therefore was not taking us seriously, and indeed used the fact that we were trying to play a role of “neutral” mediator to pressure the South African government into silencing criticism of Israel and to increase trade relations. More recently, Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly said that there will never be a Palestinian state or that such a “state” will have no control over its borders, airspace, water or gas resources and security. In short, Israel seems willing only to recognise a Bantustan that will have fewer powers than did Bophuthatswana or Transkei.

The fact is that the Oslo Peace Process has been completely torpedoed by Israel. Over the past 25 years Israel has continued to build settlements, built an illegal wall and established checkpoints around the constantly expanding settlements in the West Bank, creating Bantustans and restricting Palestinian movement within areas that were supposed to have formed part of a Palestinian State. It has laid siege to Gaza – a “toxic slum” as UN Human Rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein called it last week – and raised much of it to the ground in numerous bombardments, most cruelly in Operation Cast Lead (2008-9) and in 2014.
And since 30 March 2018, when Palestinian civil society in Gaza started its peaceful Great March of Return protest, Israel has killed at least 113 Palestinians and wounded more than 12,000 people – many maimed for life.

In light of Israel’s intransigence and aggression, it is little wonder that the vast majority of South Africans, including ANC members, have demanded that South Africa strengthen solidarity with the Palestinians and take actions to isolate apartheid Israel.

It was only by internationally isolating apartheid South Africa in support of popular uprisings, strikes and armed struggle that we were able to put enough pressure on the regime to come to the table and negotiate a South Africa that belongs to all who live in it.

Likewise, we need to intensify pressure on our government to immediately cut diplomatic ties with Israel, signalling to the world – and especially to the Palestinian people – that we have not forgotten their support for us during our Struggle. We must heed the call of the international BDS movement and demand complete trade sanctions: sport, cultural and academic boycotts; disinvestment and an arms embargo in support of Palestine that belongs to all who live in it.

Acting resolutely in solidarity with the Palestinian people is far from what Ferguson calls “mouthing of cheap slogans and boycotting engagement with the Israelis as an expression of outrage”. Rather, it will demonstrate confidence in our “international prestige” by standing for equal rights, justice and a sustainable peace while encouraging people in other countries and multilateral fora to do similarly.

It is these actions that will achieve exactly what Ferguson purports to support: crafting our foreign policy as an expression of our own constitutional aspirations. 

DM

Roshan Dadoo grew up in exile and was an activist in the Anti Apartheid Movement and ANC structures. She worked for the South African High Commission in the UK from 1996-2000 when she joined the Department of Foreign Affairs (now Department of International Relations and Co-operation). She served in the Middle East section, the Deputy Ministry and as Political Counsellor in the South African Embassy in Algeria (2004-2008). From 2009 to 2015 Roshan worked for the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa and is currently studying for a Masters degree in Development Studies. She has been active in the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the UK and in South Africa.

THE DEATH OF THE 2 STATE ILLUSION THOSE WHO SUPPORT TWO STATES SUPPORT A TWO STATE SOLUTION

This article comes from Tony Greenstein's blog. It is one of the best analyses I have yet read, and it is all the better because it makes mincemeat of the mainstream media with their pathetic bleatings about what is going on in Palestine and the ongoing disaster for the Palestinian people in their native land and the stealing thereof of an occupying settler nation which has really got no claim to the land whatever.

When is the world going to sit up and do something about it - if ever? And at the moment the world means the US of A.

As a South African, I have seen the worst aspects of an apartheid state, but Israel has managed to amplify it a thousand times over.

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Tuesday, 22 May 2018

Israel/Palestine is already one state –the only people who talk of 2 States are Zionists

The Death of the 2 State Illusion

Those Who Support 2 States

Support an Apartheid Solution

Another brilliant article from Israel’s premier journalist, Gideon Levy.  It can only be a matter of time, perhaps when Netanyahu has finally silenced the few remaining NGO’s and human rights organisations that attention will be turned to Levy and Amira Hass and the other journalists who aren’t prepared to play ball with Zionism.

There are some gullible fools and political cowards unfortunately in the Palestine solidarity movement, who still call for a 2 State solution  These naive souls, amongst which one must count the Executive of the Palestine Solidarity  Campaign, who sincerely believe that the Israeli government is going to agree to a separate Palestinian state.

It is difficult to know whether these people actually believe this, because it is always hard to get inside someone’s head.  The fact that Netanyahu stated at the last election that there would be no  2 state solution, the fact that there is no member of his ruling coalition who calls for a Palestinian state is irrelevant.  When Tzipi Hotoveli, Israel’s religious nut of a Deputy Foreign Minister and a member of Likud states that “We need to return to the basic truth of our rights to this country,” she said. “This land is ours. All of it is ours. We did not come here to apologise for that.” what part of that I wonder do these people not understand?

The Israeli Labour Party also doesn’t believe in a 2 state solution.  Sure they pay lip service to it but the position as outlined by their leader Avi Gabbay is opposition to the dismantlement of the settlements.  The settlements have been so constructed as to prevent a 2 state solution and without their being dismantled any Palestinian state would have more holes in it than a Swiss cheese.

The Times of Israel of 2^nd November 2017 summed up the situation perfectly: After pro-settlement comments, Gabbay reiterates support for two-state solution

Of course I would be less than honest if I didn’t confess to opposing 2 states on principle.  The root cause of the problem in Palestine is not two peoples fighting over one piece of land as liberal Zionists pretend but a settler colonial movement which displaced an indigenous population and erected a racial supremacists state as in South Africa.  A 2 state solution, even were it feasible, would be a monstrosity.  Israel would be even more racist and aggressive.  The Palestinian state, which would be a Bantustan in practice, would be a horrific police state whose main job was to police its own subjects in order to keep Israel satisfied, because there would be a massive power imbalance between them.  Indeed the Palestinian ‘state’ would be something like the quisling entity that the Palestinian Authority operates at the moment.

That is why I opposed, in 1993, the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO.  At the time I resigned from PSC over the issue when, at an emergency conference, two-thirds of the meeting agreed to support them. My views on them are best represented in a debate with Julia Bard of the Jewish Socialists Group in the pages of National Labour Briefing, A Mess of Potage in October 1993.

In the article I said that:

The Accord divides the Palestinian nation in two. It excludes not only _ those Palestinians living inside pre-1967 Israel, but the two million Palestinians who were exiled in 1948 and 1967. It explicitly rules out the right of return. Israel continues to control the Allenby bridge to Jordan.

Under the Accord Israel will retain control over land, water and resources. The Palestinians will collect their own garbage, control education and health and police themselves. In effect, the prison guards will be removed from inside to outside the prison walls.

The debate is reproduced in Oslo Revisited - Debate Between Julia Bard (JSG) & Tony Greenstein (Return)

Zionism was not founded in order to establish a state in half the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael).  It claims the whole land.  Indeed the biblical Land of Israel extends up to the Litani river in Lebanon and down to the Nile in Egypt and across to the Euphrates in Iraq, so there is quite a way to go.  The idea of stopping half way and handing over 22% of the territory of Mandate Palestine is absurd.

Of course there are some people who talk about 2 states who know full well that it will never be achieved.  Firstly Zionist organisations in this country, in particular Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour Movement but also the Board of Deputies of British Jews support 2 states.  However these same organisations support all Israel’s repressive actions in the Territories.  They all support the Occupation wholeheartedly.  Yet unless there is sufficient opposition to the military occupation, there is no chance that Israel will unilaterally hand over part of the West Bank for a state. 

We saw that last week when the Board of Deputies and Labour Friends of Israel rushed to support the Israeli army's gunning down of 60 unarmed Palestinian demonstrators whilst blaming the violence, not on those who did the shooting but on the victims (for which Hamas is the all-purpose address).

It should therefore clear that these organisations are hypocritical liars.  They know that there will never be a 2 state solution as does the pro-Zionist Alliance for Workers Liberty, an allegedly Trotskyist organisation.  So why do they support 2 states?  Because that is the best way to undermine calls for the only possible solution to Israeli Apartheid, a democratic, secular state in the whole of Palestine.  Support for 2 States is also a way of opposing the call for equal rights for all those under Israeli rule, i.e. an end to the present Apartheid situation.

There are of course a second group, such as Jeremy Corbyn, who have no analysis worthy of the name and simply oppose Israeli repression and call for a 2 State Solution because they fondly imagine that the ‘international community’ will put pressure on Israel to conform.  However it should be obvious even to these people that the United States, which is in essence the ‘international community’ has no intention whatsoever of pressurising Israel to agree to a 2 state solution.

Emily Thornberry, Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary also calls for 2 States.  I have no doubt whatsoever that she does not believe it is possible.  She is an ardent Zionist and a member of Labour Friends of Israel.  As such her posturing on the issue is entirely cynical.  She is above all a supporter of the Atlantic Alliance and the special relationship with the USA.  Israel is integral to that.

The reality today is that there is already one state.  As Gideon Levy says, there is no border between pre-1967 Israel and today’s Greater Israel.  The only question therefore is whether or not all those living under Israeli rule should be granted equal rights.  Those who oppose this are supporters of the present Apartheid situation.  Of course this will mean that there will no longer be a Jewish State.   That is not such a loss.  What is a Jewish state?  Does a state pray to god or put on tefillin (phylacteries)?  A Jewish state simply means a state where Jews have more rights than non-Jews.  It is a Jewish supremacist state and no one who calls themselves a socialist should have anything to do with such a concept.

Tony Greenstein 

A debate on the Oslo Accords in Labour Briefing in October 1993 with the Jewish Socialist's Julia Bard

Calling Israel a democracy when less than half its subjects live in freedom is a propaganda trick that has worked better than one would have thought

Gideon Levy   Apr 15, 2018 

FILE PHOTO: Arrests at the Gaza border, 2007AP

With the approach this week of celebrations marking Israel’s 70th birthday, 12 million people live in the country. Some of them are citizens, some are residents, some are detainees, and all are subjects. Everyone’s fate has been determined by the country’s governing institutions.

On this Independence Day, we have to acknowledge that the country’s genuine borders are the Mediterranean Sea to the west and the Jordan River to the east, including not only the West Bank but also the Gaza Strip. Israel controls all this territory and everyone who lives there through various and sundry means, even if from a legal standpoint there’s no mention of this.

Forget the law. Israel long ago abandoned it. In practice it rules Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In the case of Gaza, it suffices with control from the outside, which is more convenient. On Israel’s 70th birthday, the time has come to recognize that the occupation of the territories in 1967 is not temporary. It was never meant to be and never will be. The 1967 border has been erased. The distinction between 1948 and 1967 doesn’t exist.

It was only in the state’s first 19 years, a blink of an eye from a historical perspective, that the country existed without the territories. For the balance of its history, the occupation has been an inseparable part of it, its character, its government, its essence, its DNA. What existed here for a brief time and is gone will not be coming back.

It’s critical that we rip the cover off the alleged transience of the occupation, which for some Israelis has been a sweet delusion and for others a dangerous threat. There is an abyss dividing a temporary occupation and a permanent one.

In its early years, Israel was small in area and population, but its youth, like everyone’s youth, quickly passed. For most of its existence, Israel hasn’t resembled the girl we remember. Its days as a small country with a Jewish majority have passed and the clock can’t be turned back. It’s no longer the small woman of our dreams. It’s the big woman of our nightmares.

On Israel’s 70th birthday, the time has come to recognize that Israel is a binational state under whose control two peoples live, equal in size. It maintains separate governing systems for them: a democratic one for Jews, discrimination for Israeli Arabs, and dictatorship for Palestinians. It’s not an equal democracy for all its subjects, meaning, of course, that it’s not a democracy.

There’s no such democracy where what’s allowed for one people isn’t for another. Therefore, on its 70th anniversary, Israel being called a democracy when fewer than half its subjects live in freedom is nothing but a propaganda trick that has worked to a greater extent than one would have thought.

It’s not only Israelis who deny and repress this reality. It’s more convenient for the Western world, too, to look at Israel’s more enlightened side, to ignore its dark side and continue to call it a democracy. After all, in the West, what country hasn’t also had such a colonialist back yard? And who could really confront Israel, a country that rose from the ashes?

Israel is therefore the darling of the West, despite the hollow lip service to the Palestinians, and so the West too has embraced the excuse of the occupation’s temporary nature: “Just wait, wait a little longer for the ‘peace process’ and the Israelis will be pulling out of the territories.” So it’s important that the lie of the transience of the occupation be exposed.

If the occupation isn’t temporary, it would be clear that Israel isn’t a democracy but rather an apartheid state par excellence. Two peoples and two systems of rights. That’s was apartheid looks like, even if it hides behind excuses ranging from temporariness to security grounds, from the right to the land to the concept of the chosen people, including the divine promise and messianic redemption.

These excuses don’t change the picture. In South Africa, no doubt an apartheid state, the regime invoked similar excuses to justify its existence. No one bought them. But with Israel there actually are buyers. One difference between South Africa and Israel is that Israel is stronger, more sophisticated and better connected to the world. And it has done a better job obscuring its apartheid.

It’s big, strong and nondemocratic. Israel oppresses the Palestinians through various means with one result: There isn’t a single free Palestinian in the West Bank or Gaza Strip. Their fate is determined by the Israeli government in Jerusalem and the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, and they have no rights at either one. Is this not apartheid? Is it democracy?

And now on to the showy and proud Independence Day ceremonies planned by Culture Minister Miri Regev. Let’s not rain on her parade.                

Posted by Tony Greenstein at 19:00 2 Comments

PALESTINE - GENOCIDE BY BETWEEN 50 TO 100 MURDERS EVERY DAY

Palestine is being destroyed and the world sits around and does nothing,

How much longer is this genocide going to continue? Until every Palestinian has been destroyed and Israel takes over the whole of Palestine? They already control it and starve the Palestinians not so slowly any more.

Whether the Israelis like the comparison or not, what they are doing is what the Nazis did to Jews and other minority groups in the years between 1933 and 1945.

The breakup of Yugoslavia and the wars in the 1990s resulted in more genocides of the Nazi type and the Myanmar murder of the Rohingyas is carrying on the tradition of genocide around the world.

The genocides on the African continent have gone on for a long time and we cannot assume that they will stop any time soon.

The United States of America is helping to do the same in the middle east - in Syria, Iraq, Libya and other countries around the area and the question needs to be asked and asked and asked - why is the rest of the world sitting and watching and doing nothing.

Is it white people against the rest of the world? or is it some other strange anomaly in the human species?

What hope is there when there have been ongoing wars since the end of what was termed the second world war?

The Palestinian people have suffered intolerably and no country has lifted a finger to give them any assistance whatever. They have all just helped to make the matter worse and starve them out of existence altogether.

If people who have so many resources to help other people refuse to do so, we will all sink into the mire and maybe the human species will destroy itself altogether.

If that happened, at least there would be no people left to suffer anywhere any more.

This cartoon of Michael Leunig's appeared in The Age of 17 MAY 2018

                                              ISRAEL - GAZA 2018

                                                                                                        Leunig

The top paragraph of Leunig's cartoon read:

And Cain said to Abel his brother, "Let us go out to the field," and when they were in the field Cain rose against Abel and killed him. 

The bottom paragraph of the cartoon reads:

And the Lord said to Cain, "Where is Abel, your brother?" And he said "I do not know: am I my brother's keeper?" And the Lord said "What have you done? Listen! Your brother's blood cries out to me from the soil..."

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Letters from The Age 17 MAY 2018:

Gaza: Israel's security relies on fair deal for Palestinians

Instead of blaming the Palestinian leadership, Malcolm Turnbull should show some moral spine and reprimand Israel for killing unarmed protesters. The Palestinians have lost nearly everything since the acquisition of their lands by Israel in 1948 and 1967. They still have no country and are under occupation and/or siege.

In the absence of any useful diplomatic contribution from the US, it's time for other countries like Australia to step up, to pressure Israel to negotiate in good faith for a just solution to the conflict. Israel will have no security until the Palestinians get a fair deal.
Bill O'Connor, Beechworth

The 'two-state solution' must go ahead

Your editorial (16/5) makes useful points. The US and its allies, who have been staunch supporters of Israel's continued military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in the name of "Israel's right to exit", are equally guilty of shedding Palestinians' blood. Malcolm Turnbull's comment condemning Palestinians for violence should be shameful to all Australians. New Zealand's PM, Jacinda Ardern, deserves high commendation for her condemnation of Israel for the bloodshed. It is time the Western nations who are unconditional supporters of Israel put a stop to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and implement the "two-state solution" based on the 1967 borders. A peaceful means to achieve this is to declare an economic embargo against Israel until it ends its illegal occupation of the Palestinian lands.
Bill Mathew, Parkville

A piece of provocative timing

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump attended the inauguration of the new US embassy (moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem) as if it was some kind of celebrity event. Further, it was carried out on the day of the 70th anniversary of the Nakba – the date that Palestinians consider themselves to have been expelled from their homes. Is the global community really expected to think that this is not a provocation, and simply the making right of an inviolable fact that Jerusalem is exclusively the capital of Israel?
And when Palestinians are gunned down in Gaza, are we supposed to think that this is OK because those Palestinians were deluded anyway in thinking that the above was not an inviolable fact?
Stephane Levinson, Carlton

US has shameful hand in region

Donald Trump's only consistent actions since becoming President have been the ongoing provocations to destabilise the world's troubled regions. The latest massacres in Gaza are shameful evidence of how far Israel's expansionist policy can go, thanks to the support from the US administration. Coupled with the irrational scrapping of the Iran deal, Trump's diplomacy-by-tweets only serves the interests of the most reactionary sections of the US establishment.
Fethon Naoum, Portland
 

CounterPunch 11 May 2018

The Dark Side of Israeli Independence

by Brett Wilkins

 

Photo source gnuckx | CC BY 2.0

On May 14, 1948, Israel declared its independence. Each May 15, Palestinians solemnly commemorate Nakba Day. Nakba means catastrophe, and that’s precisely what Israel’s independence has been for the more than 700,000 Arabs and their five million refugee descendants forced from their homes and into exile, often by horrific violence, to make way for the Jewish state.

Land Without a People? 

In the late 19th century, Zionism emerged as a movement for the reestablishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Although Jews ruled over kingdoms there more than 2,000 years ago, they never numbered more than around 10 percent of the population from antiquity through the early 1900s. A key premise of Zionism is what literary theorist Edward Said called the “excluded presence” of Palestine’s indigenous population; a central myth of early Zionists was that Palestine was a “land without a people for a people without a land.”

At its core, Zionism is a settler-colonial movement of white, European usurpers supplanting Arabs they often viewed as inferior or backwards. Theodore Herzl, father of modern political Zionism, envisioned a Jewish state in Palestine as “an outpost of civilization opposed to barbarism.” Other early Zionists warned against this sort of thinking. The great Hebrew essayist Ahad Ha’am wrote:

We… are accustomed to believing that Arabs are all wild desert people who, like donkeys, neither see nor understand what is happening around them. But this is a grave mistake. The Arabs… see and understand what we are doing and what we wish to do on the land. If the time comes that [we] develop to a point where we are taking their place… the natives are not going to just step aside so easily.

Jewish migration to Palestine increased significantly amid the pogroms and often rabid antisemitism afflicting much of Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century. As control of Palestine passed from the defeated Ottoman Turks to Britain toward the end of World War I, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour declared “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Israelis and their supporters often cite the Balfour Declaration when defending Israel’s legitimacy. What they never mention is that it goes on to state that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”

Those “existing non-Jewish communities” still made up more than 85 percent of Palestine’s population at the time. As Zionist immigration swelled in the interwar years, conflict between the Jewish newcomers and the Arabs who had lived in Palestine for centuries was inevitable.

The Palestine Problem

Some Arabs reacted to the massive influx by rioting and attacking Jews, who responded by forming militias. Hundreds of Jews and Arabs were murdered in a series of clashes and massacres throughout the 1920s, and as yet another wave of Jewish migration surged into Palestine following the rise of Hitler, Britain formed the Peel Commissionto examine the “Palestine problem.” The commission proposed a “two-state solution” — one for Jews, another for Arabs, with Jerusalem remaining under British control to protect Jewish, Christian and Muslim holy sites.

As Arab attacks and Jewish retaliation escalated, an exasperated Britain issued the 1939 MacDonald White Paper, which limited Jewish immigration to Palestine. It emphatically stated that the “Balfour Declaration… could not have intended that Palestine should be converted into a Jewish state against the will of the Arab population of the country.” From then on, Jewish militias, who by now had gone on the offensive and were initiating often unprovoked attacks on Arabs, targeted British occupiers as well.

The two most infamous Jewish terror militias were Irgun and Lehi, led respectively by Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, both future Israeli prime ministers. Irgun was by far the most prolific of the two terror groups, carrying out a string of assassinations and attacks meant to drive out the British. On July 22, 1946, Irgun fighters bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people, including 17 Jews, an attack still celebrated in Israel today. They bombed and shot up crowded markets, trains, cinemas and British police and army posts, killing hundreds of men, women and children. Meanwhile, Lehi assassinated British minister of state Lord Moyne in Cairo in 1944, while planning to kill Winston Churchill as well.

“No Room for Both”

With it soldiers, police, officials and, increasingly, its reputation constantly under attack and its resources strained to the breaking point after World War II, Britain withdrew from Palestine in frustration in 1947. The “Palestine problem” was handed off to the fledgling United Nations, which, under intense United States pressure, voted to partition the territory. The Arabs were not consulted. Jews, who comprised just over one-third of Palestine’s population, would get 55 percent of its land. Arabs were enraged.

Jews rejoiced. There was, however, a huge problem with the UN partition plan. If the state of Israel was to be both Jewish and democratic, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians would have to leave. Forever. Years earlier, Jewish National Land Fund director Joseph Weitz said:

Among ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both people in this country… and there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to neighboring countries… We must not leave a single village, a single tribe.

“A Bit Like A Pogrom”

To that end, David Ben-Gurion, who would soon become Israel’s first prime minister, and his inner circle drafted Plan Dalet, the “principle objectiveof the operation [being] the destruction of Arab villages,” according to official orders. At times the mere threat of violence was enough to coerce Arabs from their homes. Sometimes appalling slaughter was required to get the job done. In the most notorious of what Israeli historian Benny Morris has identified as Nakba 24 massacres, more than 100 Arab men, women and children were killed by Jewish militias at Deir Yassinon April 9, 1948. One 11-year-old survivor later recalled:

“They blew down the door, entered and started searching the place… They shot the son-in -law and when one of his daughters screamed, they shot her too. They then called my brother and shot him in our presence and when my mother screamed and bent over my brother, carrying my little sister, who was still being breast-fed, they shot my mother too.”

“To me it looked a bit like a pogrom,” confessed Mordechai Gichon, an intelligence officer in the Haganah, which would soon become the core of the Israel Defense Forces. “When the Cossacks burst into Jewish neighborhoods, then that should have looked something like this.” Widespread looting and brutal and often deadly rapes were also reminiscent of antisemitic pogroms, with Jews now the aggressors instead of the victims

.

News of Deir Yassin spread like wildfire through Palestine, prompting many Arabs to flee for their lives. This is exactly what Jewish commanders — who would play self-described “horror recordings” of shrieking women and children on loudspeakers when approaching Arab villages — wanted. Attacking Jewish militias typically gave most of their victims room to escape; commanders generally preferred a fright-to-flight strategy over wanton slaughter.

“Like Nazis”

Jewish ethnic cleansing of Palestine accelerated when Arab armies from Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq invaded with the intent of smothering the nascent state of Israel in its cradle. On July 11, 1948, future Israeli foreign and defense minister Moshe Dayan led a raid on Lydda in which over 250 Arab men, women, children and old people were killed with automatic weapons, grenades and cannon. What followed, on future prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s orders, was the wholesale expulsion of  Lydda and Ramle. Tens of thousands of Arabs fled in what became known as the Lydda Death March. Israeli reporter Ari Shavit wrote:

Children shouted, women screamed, men wept. There was no water. Every so often, a family… stopped by the side of the road to bury a baby who had not withstood the heat; to say farewell to a grandmother who had collapsed from fatigue. After a while, it got even worse. A mother abandoned her howling baby under a tree. [Another] abandoned her week-old boy.

The international community was horrified and outraged by the Jewish atrocities of 1948-49. In the United States, a prominent group of Jews including Albert Einstein blasted the “terrorists” who attacked Deir Yassin. Others compared the Jewish militias to their would-be German destroyers, including Aharon Cizling, Israel’s first agriculture minister, who lamented that “now Jews have behaved like Nazis and my entire being is shaken.”

Jews indeed behaved something like Nazis as they expelled or exterminated Arabs for their own lebensraumin Palestine. By the time it was all over, over 400 Arab villages were destroyed or abandoned, their residents — some of whom still hold the keys to their stolen homes — never to return. Moshe Dayan, one of Israel’s most exalted heroes, confessed in all but name to Israel’s ethnic cleansing in a 1969 speech:

“We came to this country, which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing… a Jewish state here. Jewish villages were built in place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because those geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either… There is not one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”

War on Truth & Memory

Today such honesty is sorely lacking, both among most Israeli Jews and their US coreligionists and supporters. In addition to efforts to silence and even outlaw peaceful protest movements like the growing worldwide Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) effort, Zionists and their apologist allies — some with their own competing religious agenda — have aggressively sought to erase the Nakba from memory. This is accomplished by denying Israeli crimes and by tarring critics with allegations of antisemitism.

Special vitriol is reserved for the “self-hating”Jews who dare shine light on Israeli atrocities. Teddy Katz, a graduate student at Haifa University and ardent Zionist who uncovered the mass slaughter of 230 surrendering Arabs at Tantura on May 22, 1948, was sued, publicly humiliated, forced to apologize and stripped of his degree for the “offense” of telling the ugly, uncomfortable truth. The Israeli government even went as far as banning diaspora Jews who are too critical from making the “birthright return” to Israel granted to every other Jew in the world.

No Return, No Retreat

Speaking of the right to return, as Nakba refugees fled Palestine, often to settle in squalid camps in neighboring countries, the United Nations passed Resolution 194, which guaranteed that every Palestinian refugee could return to their home and receive compensation for damages. None ever did.

 Israel ignored this and dozens of other UN resolutions over the coming decades, its impunity ensured by massive and unwavering US support.

Enabled and emboldened, Israel now marks 70 years of statehood and over half a century of illegal occupation in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Today, Israel’s illegal Jewish settler colonies are the spear-tip of what critics call its slow-motion ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Its Jews-only settlements and roads, separation wall and ubiquitous military checkpoints are, according to Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu and others, the foundation of an apartheid state. Its periodic invasions of Gaza, with their 100-1 death toll disparities, their slaughter of entire families and enduring economic privation, are globally condemned as war crimes.

Yet through it all, the Palestinian people endure, despite the overwhelming odds against them. The more honest voices among earlier generations of Zionists foresaw this. Echoing Ahad Ha’am’s 1891 warning that “the natives are not going to just step aside so easily,” Ben-Gurion later acknowledgedthat “a people which fights against the usurpation of its land will not tire so easily.” Seventy years later, neither Palestinians nor Jews have tired so easily, and the world is no closer to solving the “Palestine problem.” Meanwhile, Jews, Arabs and the wider world brace for the next inevitable explosion. This is colonialism’s deadly legacy.

More articles by:Brett Wilkins

 

Brett Wilkins is editor-at-large for US news at Digital Journal. Based in San Francisco, his work covers issues of social justice, human rights and war and peace. 

HSBC: Put your money where your mouth is on human rights

Time to up the heat on HSBC, writes Marienna Pope-Weidemann, as War on Want call on the bank to stop arming Israel.

19 April 2018 Red Pepper online journal
 

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Marienna Pope-Weidemann is War on Want's press officer. @MariennaPW

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Against incredible odds, Palestinians continue to resist Israel’s system of oppression, demanding freedom and justice and calling on people of conscience here in the UK to do all we can to stop UK corporations from supporting – and profiting from – Israeli apartheid. That’s what this campaign is all about.

During recent demonstrations in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military has once again shown the world its willingness to turn deadly force on unarmed civilians.

 Despite calls for restraint from the UN, at least 30 Palestinians were shot and killed by Israeli security forces, with one video surfacing which showed an onlooker cheering as an Israeli sniper shot an unarmed Palestinian protester.

To find those responsible, we don’t just need to look as far as the Israeli state or even the UK, which arms it. If you have an HSBC branch on your high street, there’s complicity much closer to home.

Financial institutions are a crucial link in the chain of complicity in Palestinian oppression; this includes some of the UK’s biggest banks. HSBC holds £831 million pounds worth of shares in companies selling weapons and military technology to Israel, such as BAE Systems,  Boeing, and Elbit Systems. Weapons and military technology made by these companies are used in Israeli attacks on Palestinians, not just when global headlines flare up around major offensives, but also as part of the daily brutality and violence of Israel’s apartheid system. 

This includes extrajudicial executions, mass arrests, use of live ammunition to disperse unarmed crowds, and house demolitions using armoured bulldozers.

Israel’s illegal military blockade and large scale bombings of the Gaza Strip have contributed to a historic humanitarian crisis. Two million residents live in Gaza without reliable electricity. 70 percent of the population has no access to clean water, more than half suffer from food insecurity and tens of thousands have been left displaced, injured and traumatised by successive bombardments.

One of the most damning companies in HSBC’s list of shareholdings is Elbit Systems, one of Israel’s largest arms manufacturers, which has made white phosphorous for military use and  cluster munition cannons sold to the Israeli military. Cluster munitions are banned under an international treaty signed by the UK because they disperse smaller bombs over a wide area, posing a deadly threat to civilians in densely populated areas. 
  
In response to War on Want’s queries, HSBC has hidden behind a Defence Equipment Sector Policy, which states that HSBC does not provide financial services to arms companies. It was War on Want’s Deadly Investments investigation which revealed HSBC was still listed as a shareholder in at least 19 arms companies that sell weapons to Israel. Our investigation exposed that the policy has built-in loopholes that allow for it to continue to actively maintain business relationships with some of the world’s largest arms companies.

Over 18,000 people have already taken action by writing to HSBC Group Chief Executive John Flint, and over 20 HSBC branches across the UK have been regularly targeted by campaigners inspired by the Palestinian call on campaigners to take up divestment campaigns focused on banks and other companies involved in arming Israel.

The focus on HSBC comes at a shaky time for the bank, as it is also embroiled in a host of tax-dodging scandals, and was at the centre of reports on companies with the worst gender pay gaps. With these reputational issues already at play, HSBC has been growing increasingly nervous about the Stop Arming Israel campaign. And to us, that means one thing: time to turn up the heat.

This Friday from 10am-2pm, War on Want, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and Boycott Israel Network will be protesting outside the HSBC Annual General Meeting to raise awareness and put pressure on shareholders. 

With the UN Secretary General calling for an independent inquiry into Israel’s use of force against unarmed Palestinian protesters this month and the UN compiling a list of companies complicit in Israeli violations of international law, the Palestinian call for divestment has never had broader support. The time has come for HSBC to put its money where its mouth is: stop arming Israel and end its corporate complicity in oppression wherever it exists.

April 27, 2018

Why Are Palestinians Protesting in Gaza?

by Mike Merryman-Lotze
 

    Once again, the Israeli military has turned its guns on Gaza — this time on unarmed protestors, in a series of shootings over the last few weeks. Gaza’s already under-resourced hospitals are straining to care for the 1,600 protesters who have been injured, on top of 40 killed.

According to a group of United Nations experts, “there is no available evidence to suggest that the lives of heavily armed security forces were threatened” by the unarmed demonstrators they fired on.

The violence is getting some coverage in the news. But the conditions in Gaza that have pushed so many to protest remain largely invisible. So do their actual demands.

The Great Return March was organized by grassroots groups in Gaza as a peaceful action with three key demands: respect for refugees’ right to return to their homes, an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, and an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

Seventy years ago, Palestinians were expelled from their homes en masse when their land was seized for the state of Israel. Many became refugees, with millions of people grouped into shrinking areas like Gaza. Fifty years ago, the rest of historic Palestine came under Israeli military occupation.

While these refugees’ right of return has been recognized by the international community, no action has been taken to uphold that right. Meanwhile, the occupation has become further and further entrenched.

For over a decade, the people of Gaza have lived under a military-imposed blockade that severely limits travel, trade, and everyday life for its 2 million residents. The blockade effectively bans nearly all exports, limits imports, and severely restricts passage in and out.

In over 20 visits to Gaza over the last 10 years, I’ve watched infrastructure degrade under both the blockade and a series of Israeli bombings.

Beautiful beaches are marred by raw sewage, which flows into the sea in amounts equivalent to 43 Olympic swimming pools every day. Access to water and electricity continually decreases, hospitals close, school hours are limited, and people are left thirsty and in the dark.

These problems can only be fixed by ending the blockade.

As Americans, we bear direct responsibility for the horrific reality in Gaza. Using our tax money, the U.S. continues to fund the Israeli military through $3.8 billion in aid annually.

A group of U.S.-based faith organizations has called out U.S. silence in a statement supporting protesters and condemning the killings: “The United States stood by and allowed Israel to carry out these attacks without any public criticism or challenge,” they said. “Such U.S. complicity is a continuation of the historical policy of active support for Israel’s occupation and U.S. disregard for Palestinian rights.”

The signatories include the American Friends Service Committee, where I work, an organization that started providing humanitarian aid to refugees in Gaza as far back as 1948.

While the U.S. does give money to the United Nations and international aid groups working in Gaza, it’s barely a drop in the bucket compared to our support of the military laying siege to the territory.

As my colleagues in Gaza have made clear, what they need isn’t more aid. That humanitarian aid is needed because of the blockade. What they need is freedom from the conditions that make life unlivable — like the blockade itself — and a long-term political solution.

Ignoring the reasons Gaza is in crisis only hurts our chances to address this manmade humanitarian horror.

Mike Merryman-Lotze has worked with the American Friends Service Committee as the Palestine-Israel Program Director since 2010.

More articles by:Mike Merryman-Lotze

SYRIA CONTROVERSY: DON'T BELIEVE THE OFFICIAL NARRATIVE

SYRIA CONTROVERSY: DON'T BELIEVE THE OFFICIAL NARRATIVE

By Max Blumenthal in Truthdig 23 APRIL 2018

A Syrian poses as he gathers with his family in the Marjeh Square in Damascus on April 15. Syria’s President Bashar Assad spoke that day to a group of visiting Russian politicians, saying that a campaign of "lies" and misinformation in the U.N. Security Council accompanied Western missile strikes against his country. (Hassan Ammar / AP)

Editor’s note: Reports of a chemical attack in Syria have generated controversy and conflicting claims about what happened and who was responsible. The April 7 event is still under investigation. On Thursday, Truthdig columnist Sonali Kolhatkar wrote a column titled “Why Are Some on the Left Falling for Fake News on Syria?” Truthdig contributor Max Blumenthal questions her analysis.

 Below is his response. You can read Kolhatkar’s take here. 

This month, the United States, the United Kingdom and France launched airstrikes in Syria in flagrant violation of international law and entirely on the basis of images that had appeared on social media.

To date, no concrete evidence of a chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government in Douma has been produced to support the Trump administration’s justification for the allies’ bombing in response. The only sources of what State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert described as “our own intelligence” on chemical warfare allegations were the White Helmets and the Syrian American Medical Society.

The U.S. government has funded both groups, and they operate exclusively alongside Salafi-jihadi militants, including the local affiliate of al-Qaida and Islamic State. Both groups also are avowedly dedicated to stimulating support for a Western-led war of regime change against Syrian President Bashar Assad. Neither, therefore, can be considered credible sources of intelligence.

In 2007, journalist James Bamford recalled how Americans had been subjected to “a long line of hyped and fraudulent stories that would eventually propel the U.S. into a war with Iraq—the first war based almost entirely on a covert propaganda campaign targeting the media.” The dirty war on Syria represents an extension of that strategy, with the mainstream media operating hand in glove with insurgent-allied influence operations like the White Helmets to cultivate public support for another war of regime change.

As Adam Johnson demonstrated at the media monitoring outfit FAIR, not one editorial page of any major American newspaper opposed Donald Trump’s strike on Syria. And in the attack’s wake, the Western commentariat criticized Trump not for his illegal bombing campaign but for what was seen as the insufficient violence he displayed.

Having exposed itself once again as an eager channel for an outrageous series of pro-war deceptions, the Western media has forfeited the trust of the public and earned the extreme skepticism, if not the angry wrath, of those it claims to serve. As citizens turn in unprecedented numbers to alternative media sources, their governments have falsely labeled these sources as “Russian bots” and waged a campaign to suppress RT, perhaps the only international English-language network willing to provide a platform to critical voices on the recent events in Syria. When British Adm. Alan West questioned the official narrative on alleged Syrian chemical attacks during a recent BBC interview, his host essentially admonished him against thinking critically in public because “we’re in an information war with Russia on so many fronts.”

In this repressive atmosphere, as space for challenging pro-war narratives closes off like never before, Sonali Kolhatkar—the host of a leading public affairs radio program that has provided me and many other progressive journalists and activists with a friendly platform—attempted an unusual intervention. Instead of weighing in to defend alternative anti-war media, Kolhatkar lectured “some on the left” for their refusal to trust mainstream coverage of the incident in Douma. Posing as an opponent of bombing Syria, Kolhatkar assailed those who questioned the core rationale for the bombing, accusing them of having fallen for “fake news.”

Echoing The Intercept and Al-Jazeera pundit Mehdi Hasan, who recently ranted at an elusive mass of left-wing “Assadists,” Kolhatkar even accused anti-imperialist elements of secretly “desir[ing] glorification of leaders and strongmen.” In doing so, she not only assailed the process of intensive truth seeking that citizens should be encouraged to undertake in public debates over war, she gaslighted the truth seekers, casting them as authoritarian lunatics in need of reprogramming.

Kolhatkar took special aim at veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk, who was able to enter Douma and produce testimony by a Syrian doctor that undercut insurgent claims of a chemical attack. To counter Fisk’s on-the-ground reporting, Kolhatkar cited an array of articles from The Guardian, Al-Jazeera, The Associated Press and The New York Times that mostly relied on correspondents outside Syria. Exhibiting a reflexive faith in the credibility of these established outlets, she neglected to examine their record of heinously biased coverage of Syria or the partisan sources they relied on in reporting on Douma.

Citing a Guardian report, Kolhatkar wrongly claimed that the article was written by “journalists on the ground.” The piece was actually datelined from Beirut and Istanbul and contained no on-the-ground reporting. (Kolhatkar’s false reference to “journalists on the ground” was removed with an acknowledgment at the end of the column after I alerted Truthdig editors to the error.) The article’s authors, Kareem Shaheen and Martin Chulov, relied on only one named “Syrian” source: Ghanem Tayara, a doctor based not in Syria but in Birmingham, England. Tayara, who has been agitating within the U.K. for a Western-led military intervention for several years, also was the main source asserting that his colleagues had been coerced into giving testimony that supported the government’s line.

Strangely, Kolhatkar scoffed at the notion that The Guardian could have been part of “some grand conspiracy” to stimulate support for regime change in Syria. She thus ignored the paper’s editorializing for military intervention in Syria, as well as the background of its Middle East correspondent: As I previously reported, Shaheen has promoted material spun out by The Syria Campaign, the PR firm representing the White Helmets, and has favorably quoted the spokesman for Ahrar al-Sham, a Turkish-backed Salafi militia implicated in an array of atrocities. Shaheen was, in fact, the first Western reporter allowed into insurgent-controlled Khan Sheikoun by Ahrar al-Sham after allegations of a chemical attack there in April 2017. Demonstrating his pro-opposition bent, he once tweeted a photo of a neighborhood that had been destroyed by al-Qaida and falsely described it as an exhibit of Assad’s brutality.

Turning to an Al-Jazeera report to undermine Fisk’s coverage from Douma, Kolhatkar openly wondered why any rational person might distrust this Qatari-backed news group’s coverage of Syria. She thus ignored the role of Al-Jazeera’s governmental parent as a top financial sponsor of both the White Helmets and Syria’s al-Qaida affiliate, the Nusra Front. Al-Jazeera has been so dedicated to regime change in Syria that it partnered with Google and Hillary Clinton’s State Department in 2012 to encourage the defection of Syrian army officers to the CIA-backed armed opposition.

The network’s Arabic arm, meanwhile, has featured calls for the genocide of Syrian minority groups by one of its most popular hosts, Faisal Qasim. While promoting the White Helmets, Al-Jazeera’s viral site, AJ+, even appeared to justify the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey by a sympathizer of al-Qaida.

Al-Jazeera also has given its “personality of the week” award to one of al-Qaida’s most prominent media figures in Syria, Bilal Abdul Kareem.
While Al-Jazeera might play a valuable role in providing Westerners with a regular stream of information and opinions on the Middle East, it is about as far from an impartial source on Syria as a network can be. To cast it as an objective source, as Kolhatkar did, would probably qualify under the definition of what she called “fake news.”

Next, in her bid to discredit Fisk, Kolhatkar cited an Associated Press article by Bassem Mroue filed from Douma. However, she strangely omitted the following section, which undermined her case for accusing the Syrian government of carrying out a chemical attack by air:

Nuseir, 25, said he ran from the shelter to a nearby clinic and fainted. After he was revived, he returned to the shelter and found his wife and daughters dead, with foam coming from their mouths.
He and two other residents accused the rebel Army of Islam of carrying out the attack. [Emphasis added.] As they spoke, government troops were not far away but out of earshot. Nuseir said a gas cylinder was found leaking the poison gas, adding that he didn’t think it was dropped from the air because it still looked intact.

The most compelling reasons to doubt that the Syrian government carried out a chemical attack in Douma lay not only in witness testimony but in a basic consideration of motivation and timing. The Syrian army had completely defeated the Jaysh al-Islam insurgents in eastern Ghouta and was on the precipice of destroying them in Douma when the chemical attack was alleged to have happened. From a military standpoint, the Syrian government had no need to deploy chemical weapons, as it had already achieved victory through conventional means. From a political perspective, a chemical attack was suicidal—guaranteed to trip the “red line” imposed by Western governments and immediately trigger military intervention.

The insurgents, however, had every reason to allege that a chemical attack had taken place, as stimulating Western intervention has been their only hope for achieving the objective of regime change.

Kolhatkar attempted to turn this obvious logic on its head, wondering without any apparent sign of irony, “Why would rebels frame Assad only to leave their stronghold right afterward?”

Perhaps the Syrian government was stupid enough to use chemical weapons when it had every motive not to do so. And maybe it was so stupid that it has used them over and over again, flagrantly daring the West to intervene.
Someday, Western governments might be able to produce enough evidence to demonstrate that this was the case. But so far, they have been unable to do so.

What’s more, they have failed to convince their citizens that another war of regime change against a formerly stable post-colonial Arab state was necessary.

Despite being subjected to a tidal wave of deceptions and a campaign of pro-war perception management of unprecedented scale, the Western public has managed to maintain an attitude of healthy distrust toward its media establishment. The everyday skeptics deserve our congratulations, not condescending lectures and elitist contempt.

Max Blumenthal

Max Blumenthal is the editor of the GrayzoneProject.com and the co-host of the podcast Moderate Rebels. He is an award-winning journalist and the author of books, including the best-selling "Republican…

In this article:

adam johnson al jazeera alan west anti-war chemical weapons donald trump douma fair ghanem tayara google heather nauert hillary clinton isis islamic state kareem shaheen mainstream media martin chulov mehdi hasan middle east robert fisk rt russia sky news sonali kolhatkar state department syria syrian american medical society the associated press the guardian the new york times united states war white helmets