Continued:
Even if none of what I wrote about the Zionists and what they did in Palestine up to and including the World War II period were true, what they did after the war, particularly beginning in late 1947 and especially in 1948, would be enough to characterize the Zionist state as illegitimate. Then, Zionist forces seized three-quarters of the land and expelled close to 1 million Palestinians. Paramilitary groups such as the Irgun and the Haganah carried out massacres. I personally have Palestinian friends whose parents and grandparents were awakened in the middle of the night by Zionists soldiers and forced, at gun point, to flee their homes. One of my friends carries the key to her family?s house around her neck; the house is still there, just outside Hebron (in the West Bank), lived in since 1948 by the same Zionist family.
By the way, future Israeli prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir were leaders of these paramilitary groups, which were as much terrorist groups as anything the West typically reserves that term for today.
Massacres, you may ask. Yes, indeed. There was a famous one in the small Palestinian Arab village of Deir Yassin. Menachem Begin was there to help murder 254 men, women, and children, and steal their land. Later, Begin wrote, in celebration of what had been accomplished: ?All in the Jewish forces proceeded to advance through Haifa like a knife through butter. The Arabs began fleeing in panic, shouting ?Deir Yassin?.?
The official Israeli Defense Forces carried out other massacres. About Dueima, another Palestinian Arab village, an IDF soldier actually wrote about what he was an eyewitness to (and later regretted): ?They killed between eighty to one hundred Arab men, women and children. To kill the children they fractured their heads with sticks. There was not one home without corpses. ... Educated and well-mannered commanders who were considered ?good guys? ... became base murderers, and this not in the storm of battle, but as a method of expulsion and extermination.?
Close to 500 Palestinian villages existed in the territory that came under Israeli occupation after partition in 1947. During 1948 and 1949, nearly 400 of them were razed to the ground. More were destroyed in the 1950s. In 1969, Moshe Dayan, former chief of staff and minister of defense, summarized: ?We came here to a country that was populated by Arabs, and we are building here a Hebrew, Jewish state. Instead of Arab villages, Jewish villages were established ... There is not a single [Jewish] settlement that was not established in the place of a former Arab village.?
So, Israel was established with massacres and land grabs. What about the old story that the Zionists had no choice because the survival of the new state was threatened by hostile Arab neighbors? It?s true that there were some military clashes with neighboring countries in 1948, as those countries took small (and largely fruitless actions) meant to look as if they were defending the Palestinians. The rulers of those countries saw an opportunity: the existence of a colonial-settler state in the midst of the Arab world would divert the attention of the Arab masses away from their oppressors in their own countries -- that is, the ruling despots. That would serve the despots interests, which is why the key Arab governments accepted Israel?s founding and were already in negotiation with the new Israeli government.
The ?security? argument for Israel?s continued land grabs has always been a fraud. Moshe Sharett, an Israeli prime minister in the 1950s, wrote as much in his memoirs. He states that the Zionist political and military leadership never believed in any Arab danger to Israel, but that Israel deliberately tried to maneuver and force the Arab states into military confrontations the Israelis were certain the Zionists could precisely so that Israel could destabilize Arab regimes and occupy more territory. Sharrett wrote that Israel?s aim has always been to ?dismember the Arab world, defeat the Arab national movement and create puppet regimes under regional Israeli power? and ?to modify the balance of power in the region radically, transforming Israel into the major power in the Middle East.?
So much for a protective homeland for Jews fleeing anti-Semitism. This, though, explains why the United States backs Israel with more foreign aid than any other country. An Israel that does what Sharett explains serves the interests of the U.S. rulers tremendously. If they have to couch their support for Israel in the language of fighting anti-Semitism, that?s fine.
Before 1947, Jews owned about 6 percent of the land in Palestine. In the process of establishing the State of Israel, the Zionists expropriated 90 percent of the land, the vast majority of which formerly belonged to Arabs. They emptied whole cities of their Palestinian Arab population. They seized factories, rolling stock, orchards, and houses. This is, and continues to be, ethnic cleansing.
Then, to bolster the population, Israel established the ?The Law of Return.? I am a Jew, born in the United States. I am an American citizen. Yet, I can get on a plane to Tel Aviv tomorrow and declare myself an Israeli citizen, a citizen of a land to which I have no claim and no connection other than a supposed Biblical one. My friend Lana, the woman who wears the key around her neck (see above), is also an American citizen. She was born of Palestinian parents who fled to the United States from a refugee camp. Her family are Christians; there are quite a few Christian Palestinian Arabs. Were she to fly with me, she would get off in Tel Aviv and have no such right to claim her citizenship. When she visits her family still in the West Bank, she has to avoid Israel altogether, entering via Jordan and then enduring checkpoint after checkpoint after checkpoint, and humiliation after humiliation after humiliation.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
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