They may come from different stages in the history of Zionist genocide and theft in Palestine, but the following vignettes serve as an eternal warning that while the lips may be whispering sweet nothings, the hand is invariably reaching for the knife:
1933:
"His Excellency opens the Egyptian Medical congress and we give a tea party for them in afternoon. Hardly any of the Palestinian Arabs invited turn up. Weizmann and Arlosoroff to dinner in the evening. I sit next to Mrs Weizmann and have a long talk to Weizmann himself. Most interesting. He is very charming, a magnetic personality, tho' I don't feel it as much as some: intensely clever, seemingly very reasonable. But it is his charm, and his reasonableness that make him so dangerous, for at heart he is as uncompromising as any of them. He says that as Arabs must realize that they can't drive the Jews into the sea, so the Jews must realize they can't drive the Arabs into the desert. The onus is on the Jews to prove that they do not want to do this. That is what he says and it sounds very well. But does he mean it? I am sure not." (CG Eastwood, Private Secretary to General Sir Arthur Wauchope, Diary entry, 4/4/33, quoted in Mandate Days: British Lives in Palestine 1918-1948, AJ Sherman, 1997, p 88)
1967:
"That same evening (June 3) [1967] Moshe Dayan's first press conference statement as newly appointed Israeli Minister of Defense came over the ticker at the newspaper office. When the night editor had read and subheaded the copy, he turned it over to me for reading. Dayan's words were remarkably mild; he talked about waiting for international diplomatic efforts and admitted to an Israeli loss of military initiative. 'The government - before I became a member of it - embarked on diplomacy; we must give it a chance', Dayan said.
"The Israeli Defense Minister had also sent several thousand Israeli soldiers on 'leave'; they were photographed for the press as they relaxed on the beaches of Tel Aviv during the weekend. These final touches by Dayan reinforced the overall feeling among foreign correspondents (already aware of throbbing diplomatic lines of contact between Cairo and Washington and the paper 'blockade' at Tiran) that the crisis was about to ebb.
"But in Arab Jerusalem that Saturday evening Dayan sounded too much like Ben-Gurion offering to go to Cairo for direct peace talks with Abdul Nasser at the very moment that Israeli troops were moving out to begin the 1956 Suez War.
"We laughed at the idea of running the Dayan story under the headline: 'Israelis About to Attack'. It was part of a running, bitter private joke of ours: how the Arab nationalist always threatened blood, thunder, and ruin and then did nothing while the Israelis talked softly, spoke of peace and reconciliation, and struck straight for the jugular. That evening the night editor put to bed the last issue of The Palestine News." (The Fall of Jerusalem, Abdullah Schleifer, 1972, pp 154-155)
2004:
"'We shouldn't believe anything that is said. We should just monitor what happens on the ground', said Dror Etkes, an expert on settlement construction who works for the Israeli pressure group Peace Now. 'There is no connection between what is said by the Government and what happens on the ground'." (Israel ploughs on with huge settlement, Ed O'Loughlin, Sydney Morning Herald, 14/8/04)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
"how the Arab nationalist always threatened blood, thunder, and ruin and then did nothing while the Israelis talked softly, spoke of peace and reconciliation, and struck straight for the jugular"
Maybe, if the Arabs stop threatening blood, thunder, and ruin, we Israelis will be less paranoid?
Maybe, if Israel withdraws from occupied Palestinian land, allows the refugees of 48 & 67 to return, ceases visiting actual blood, thunder and ruin on the Palestinians, and opts for genuine peace and reconciliation in the context of a unitary, binational, and apartheid-free state, you Israelis will start feeling normal.
Violence of Arabs against Jews has begun hundreds of years before the word "Zionism" even existed. I have seen written records of such violence in almost every year since about 1850, when European newspapers started to report news from "Palestine". The only reason the Arabs now "threatened... and then did nothing" is because Jews finally have a Jewish state with a Jewish army. We finally learned to fight back.
Total bullshit, of course, Hasbaroid, but were it true, isn't it interesting that, in all my readings on the origins of the Zionist movement and the Balfour Declaration, I've been able to find no reference whatever to the 'danger' posed by the supposedly anti-Semitic hordes inhabiting Palestine at the time.
Quite the contrary, this is what we get in the BD: "... It being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine..."
Post a Comment