Never Forget the Occupied Syrian Golan Heights

Now this:

"Syria has vowed to retake the Golan Heights as Donald Trump's call for the US to recognise the occupied territory as part of Israel elicited strong responses from Russia, Turkey and Iran. The president ended half a century of US foreign policy and broke from post-second world war international consensus that forbids territorial conquest during war with a tweet on Thursday that said it was time 'to fully recognise Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights'. Trump said the territory was 'of critical strategic and security importance to the state of Israel and regional stability'. Israeli troops took the volcanic plateau from Syria in the six-day war in 1967 and later annexed it, moves that were condemned by the UN security council and never internationally recognised." (Trump provokes global anger by recognising Israel's claim to Golan Heights, Oliver Holmes, theguardian.com, 23/3/19)

"Following the Israeli occupation of the #Syrian #Golan in 1967, approx. 95% of the population was forcibly transferred or displaced. The Israeli army then demolished their homes, destroying one city & 340 villages and farms. These were replaced by Israeli agricultural settlements." (Tweet @GolanMarsad, 22//3/19)

(Al-Marsad "monitors and documents violations of international humanitarian rights law and humanitarian law in the Occupied Syrian Golan.")

IOW, the Israelis did to the Syrian population of the Golan in 1967 what they'd already done to the Palestinians in 1948 and 1967 (West Bank). Serial ethnic cleansing.

Liberal Zionism & the Spirit of Things

In the beginning (of the Zioinist movement) was the word. And the word (in Theodor Herzl's diary for 12 June, 1895) was Genocide: "When we occupy the land... We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border..."

Hence Israel's spiriting of  penniless Palestinians across the borders in 1948... and again (into Jordan) in 1967.

But Gaza, into which Palestinians from across southern Palestine had already been spirited in 1948? What to do with them? Well, the only border to spirit them across was the Egyptian border... into the Sinai Desert.

And how to spirit them there? A re-run of 1948 perhaps? No, that'd be a PR disaster in 1967. Hmmm:

"'Perhaps if we don't give them enough water they won't have a choice, because the orchards will yellow and wither.' That is what Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol said in 1967 about Gaza, as revealed in newly declassified documents from the time. Ofer Aderet of Haaretz reported... about this today... Eshkol, the leftist 'liberal Zionist,' was very willing to send Palestinians to the moon: 'I want them all to go, even if they go to the moon,' he said.

"As is widely known, the standard UN definition of genocide includes 'Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.'

"These newly declassified documents reveal that the genocidal policy was indeed there already in 1967... Indeed, Eshkol was aware in the months after the 1967 war of the 'suffocation and imprisonment' in Gaza in 1967... And he was quite clear about this being an instrument to effect Israeli strategy: '... precisely because of the suffocation and imprisonment there, maybe the Arabs will move from the Gaza Strip,' he said.

"Eshkol was also paraphrasing Herzl, when Eshkol told the cabinet he was 'working on the establishment of a unit or office that will engage in encouraging Arab emigration.' He noted that 'We should deal with this issue quietly, calmly and covertly, and we should work on finding a way for them to emigrate to other countries and not just over the Jordan [River].' [...] (From Liberal Israeli leaders were contemplating genocide in Gaza already in 1967, Jonathan Ofir, mondoweiss.net, 17/11/17)

And on the Sixth Day...

Today is the 50th anniversary of the last day of the June/ Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel seized control of Syria's Golan Heights, since ANNEXED. This would be Israel's last great LAND GRAB until its OCCUPATION of southern Lebanon in the early 80s.

While its propaganda apparatus hyped a non-existent 'existential threat', the reality was more mundane. Israel's aging brass still fondly remembered its glory days in 1948 when, by fire and sword, they'd GRABBED 78% of Palestine from its native people, whom they'd sent packing. Not to mention the great Sinai LAND GRAB of 1956. They were bored and itching for a bit more biff, snatch and grab.

As Israeli historian Tom Segev put it: "The generals were in their forties, family men, but they clung to the Israeli culture of youth; they were like adolescent boys or bulls in rut. They believed in force and they wanted war. War was their destiny. Almost 20 years had passed since the army had won glory in the War of Independence, and 10 years since the victory in the Sinai. They had a limited range of vision and they believed that war was what Israel needed at that moment, not because they felt the country's existence was in danger, as they wailed in an almost 'Diaspora' tone, but because they believed it was an opportunity to break the Egyptian army." (1967: Israel, the War & the Year that Transformed the Middle East, 2007, p 296)

But too much war is never enough for military brass and their political dupes. Why not go for broke on the northern front as well?

"The main pressure to seize [Syria's] Golan [Heights] came from General David Elazar of the Northern Command... In the two years preceding the war he had broached the matter not only with his superiors in the military, but also with {PM] Eshkol and a few ministers, including Allon, with whom he even discussed the possibility of occupying Damascus." (ibid, p 388)

"According to [Defence Minister] Dayan, he had found out early on Friday morning that the Syrian forces were crumbling and would be easy to defeat, although Syria was about to stop fighting, as Egypt had already done... 'Last night I did not think Egypt and Syria... would collapse like this and abandon the rest of the battle,' wrote Dayan to Elazar, 'but if this is the situation, it should be fully exploited'." (ibid, pp 390-91)

"Eshkol went on a tour of the north and met with Dayan. His impression was that the IDF was having great difficulty gaining control of the key town of Kuneitra. At this point, the Golan was a race against time. [Foreign Minister] Eban telephoned Eshkol's house to inform him that the UN Security Council had issued a cease-fire resolution, and so the fighting had to stop immediately. Since Eshkol was in the north, his wife took the call. Later Eshkol phoned her, full of enthusiasm about the view from the Golan, the water, the greenery. She gave him Eban's message and Eshkol shouted, 'Hello? Hello? I can't hear you. There's something wrong with the line, I can't hear you...' He repeated this over and over, until she understood that he did not want to 'hear'. A few hours later Kuneitra fell." (Ibid, p 397)

"Ben-Gurion, who had opposed the incursion into the Golan, now had a change of heart. Following a visit with General Elazar, he described the Golan Heights as critical to [Israel's] security." (Ibid, p 428)

As they say, 'Boys will be boys... and so will a lot of middle-aged men.'

Refugees? What Refugees?

Today is the 50th anniversary of the fifth day of the June/Six-Day War of 1967.

So Israel's grabbed the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but what to do with all those Palestinian refugees the apartheid state invariably generates whenever it goes to war?

Simple: Deny they're refugees. Say they just decided to go walkabout. Admittedly in large numbers, and all at the same time, but hey, Bedouin genes, what can I say? Oh, and play the Holocaust card. Always works a treat:

"The plight of the refugees was a photogenic subject. Israeli ambassadors overseas wrote to Jerusalem that television broadcasts from the bridges [over the Jordan] and the tent camps set up by the UN on the eastern side of the river were damning. They reported on pictures of Israeli soldiers firing shots in the air to hurry the refugees over the bridges. Correspondents estimated that the new tent camps housed some 80,000 refugees from Gaza and the West Bank. Winter was coming, threatening to make their conditions intolerable 'The most terrible impression is made by scenes of fathers with children in their arms, begging our guards to let them go back to their wives and children still on our side,' wrote Israel's ambassador to Germany. He added, 'We cannot stand up, here or in other countries, to the wave of protest, which we believe will also have political implications.' He asked that Israel at least permit family reunifications. The ambassadors were right: the ugly images in the media led too many governments, including the United States, to demand that Israel allow the refugees to return...  [PM] Eshkol gave orders to explain to British prime minister Harold Wilson that the reporters were misconstruing the scenes: the people they were photographing had left their homes willingly. As was the usual custom, he also cited the Holocaust. 'No people,' he told the vice president of the International Red Cross, 'that, like ours, six million of its old and young butchered and burnt by the Nazis less than a generation ago, could be unresponsive to any humanitarian interest'." (Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War & the Year that Transformed the Middle East, 2007, pp 540-41)

The 50-Year Rape

Today is the 50th anniversary of the fourth day of the June/Six-Day war of 1967, which of course led directly to the now 50-year old OCCUPATION of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip and Syria's Golan Heights.

Today, 50 years ago, Israel completed what it had failed to do in 1948 - seize control of, and OCCUPY, the remaining 22% of historic Palestine, namely the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Today, 50 years ago, Israel RAPED the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Is 'raped' too harsh a word for you? Don't blame me, I'm just echoing the words of then Israeli 'defence' minister, Moshe Dayan:

"The situation between us is like the complex relationship between a Bedouin man and the young girl he has taken against her wishes,' Dayan told the Palestinian poet Fadwa Tukan. 'But when their children are born, they will see the man as their father and the woman as their mother. The initial act will mean nothing to them. You, the Palestinians, as a nation, do not want us today, but we will change your attitude by imposing our presence upon you'." (Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, The War & the Year that Transformed the Middle East, 2007, p 478)

Typically, this Israeli rapist cannot be honest about his crime. See how he projects it onto his victim?

If truth be told, the rape of the West Bank has been going on for the past 50 years.

An Israeli Euphemism is Born

Today is the 50th anniversary of the third day of the June/Six Day War of 1967, the day Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem was OCCUPIED by the Israelis.

The urge to ANNEX NOW, of course, was overwhelming, but, with the rest of the world looking on, Israel's slavering ANNEXATIONISTS felt the need to disguise their naked, criminal intent with yet another in a long line of Zionist euphemisms.

Here's how they went about it:

"Begin proposed camouflaging the annexation [of East Jerusalem] within a law that would apply to the entire West Bank. The ministers wondered whether it might be possible to proceed without legislation, but Minister of Justice Shapira insisted on Knesset approval. The least dramatic method they came up with was to hide the legislation in three amendments to existing laws. These would be phrased in legalese, implying that they merely addressed administrative issues that applied to the entire country. The word 'annexation' did not appear, nor was the legislation listed as a proposed bill on the Knesset agenda. Rather, it was introduced for a first reading immediately before deliberation on it began. [Prime Minister] Eshkol was intentionally absent. The legislation was passed on to the appropriate committees and sent back for second and third readings and then for a vote, all in the same evening. There was 'no commotion and no rejoicing,' as Minister Gvati wrote. Almost all the Knesset members voted in favor, including Uri Avneri; only the Communists objected.

"The Foreign Ministry instructed its representatives to 'minimize' the political and historical significance of East Jerusalem's annexation, depicting the legislation as an administrative step necessary to facilitate water and power supplies, public transportation, and health and education services. Inspired by Begin, the ministry told its staff to use the phrase 'municipal integration' and avoid the term 'annexation' wherever possible." (Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War & the Year that Transformed the Middle East, 2007, p 434)

Is anyone out there working on a dictionary of Israeli euphemisms? I wonder.

June 1967: Zionists Lay Siege to President Johnson

Today is the 50th anniversary of the second day of the June/Six Day War of 1967, so here's another extract from Tom Segev's 1967: Israel, the War & the Year that Transformed the Middle East (2007) on what the usual suspects were up to in the United States at the time:

"[President Lyndon] Johnson himself was troubled by an announcement issued by the State Department on the first day of the war, saying that the US was taking a neutral position 'in thought, word, and deed. ' The announcement provoked a storm of protest because it read as if the United States had abandoned Israel to its fate, and [Secretary of State Dean] Rusk was forced to clarify it... It marked the beginning of a wave of public pressure to stand by Israel. At no other time could Johnson have been more certain that when it came to Israel, there was no distinction between foreign and domestic policy. For no sooner had the State Department spokesman finished his neutrality announcement than Johnson received a piece of legal advice from a friend: David Ginsburg called to direct his attention to the fact that invocation of the Neutrality Act would bar Israel from raising money for its war effort in the United States. The president's advisers quickly contacted some of his Jewish supporters.

"John Roche, a Boston professor described as Johnson's intellectual in residence, sent him a firm letter that opened with a quote from the Book of Isaiah: 'If favor is shown to the wicked, he does not learn righteousness; in the land of uprightness he deals perversely.' The neutrality declaration had proven to Roche that State Department officials wanted to 'kiss some Arab backsides.' He found this to be 'worse than unprincipled - it is stupid. The Arabs have to hate us - and the rougher the Israelis are on them, the more they will hate us NO MATTER WHAT WE DO. They must create the myth that the United States, not Israel single-handed, clobbered them.' The Americans' 'sweet-talking' of the Arabs would only make them view the United States with contempt and alienate American Jews.

"Johnson hated being pressured in this way, according to Roche. The White House log documents the president's response to a commentary he overheard on a special CBS broadcast, in which the analyst took a pro-Israel position. 'It's easy to tell that he has some sort of Jewish background,' Johnson observed. Levinson and Wattenberg, two Jewish assistants who advised the press to issue an announcement of support for Israel, got an earful from him in the hallway. 'You Zionist dupes!' he yelled at them and raised his fist. 'You're Zionist dupes in the White House.' By the evening of that day, he had received 17,445 letters and telegrams from citizens responding to the war. Ninety-eight percent of them supported Israel, approximately two percent warned him against intervening in the war, and only a handful expressed support for the Arabs." (pp 364-65)

By Way of Deception: 5 June 1967

Today is the 50th anniversary of the start of the June/Six-Day War of 1967, which began with Israel attacking and destroying the Egyptian air force on the ground. Of course, in the eyes of world public opinion, Israel could not afford to be seen as the instigator of such a blatant act of aggression against Egypt, and so its propaganda apparatus pulled all stops out to portray it as a war of self-defence.

For the back-story of Israel's dilemma, here are some extracts from Israeli historian Tom Segev's must-read, 1967: Israel, the War & the Year that Transformed the Middle East (2007):

1) "[Religious affairs minister] Warhaftig asked [defence minister] Dayan how they could present an Israeli first strike as a response, and wondered whether they could stage something. We need an alibi', said [Housing] Minister Bentov. 'I haven't got any tricks other than taking action. If someone has some other trick, I'll buy it,' replied Dayan... [Labour minister] Allon thought that the prime minister could announce to the world's heads of state that the Egyptians had attacked, and minutes later Israel would respond. The prime minister would risk a lie, but only historians would know the truth. 'I don't think the Americans will dig around to check up on what exactly happened,' Allon said. Eshkol pointed out that their action would be judged by history. The resolution that evolved asserted that Israel was acting against 'the ring of aggression tightening around it'." (p 336)

2) "The night before the attack on Egypt, Dayan had ordered the censor to maintain 'a fog of war' until the evening. 'For the first 24 hours we have to be the victims,' he said. As long as the world thought Israel was defending itself and fighting for its life, there would be no pressure from the outside to stop the attack." (p 342)

The Emails are IN! 4

Further to my posts on Fairfax journalist Tony Walker's excellent opinion piece on the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the coming 50th anniversary of same...

You'll recall his anticipation of criticism on the letters page from the usual suspects, and the clueless/gutless SMH letters editor publishing two of these (Danny Samuels and Michael Jacku).

Both gentlemen, of course, despite their spin, obfuscation and denialism on the subject of Israel's 1967 military aggression, were models of decorum, as one would expect on the letters page of a newspaper.

Go to the online comments which followed Walker's piece, however, and you'll see the usual suspects in a more direct, less disciplined mode. One of these - Joel (Canberra, May 30) - went even further, however, tossing his mask aside, and exposing Zionism's true face:

"Ross - you misunderstand. It would not only have been normal, but expected, to wipe the Palestinians out not all that long ago. The fact Israel hasn't annihilated them shows how restrained they are. If the loser uses violence, the victor can use their overwhelming force to crush them until they accept defeat - up to and including complete displacement and relocation."

No carefully crafted spin, obfuscation or denialism here, just the ravening, genocidal, Zionist beast.

Now you know what the Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza have had to endure for the past 50 bloody years.

The Emails are IN! 3

Anybody else notice that, despite Fairfax journalist Tony Walker flinging down the gauntlet on Monday - "What a smashing victory in 1967 did not entitle Israel to was to be a permanent occupier of territory and its people and settlers of land seized in defiance of international law" - The Age has published NO angry/obfuscatory letters from pro-Israel mob, either yesterday or today?

After all, the Sydney Morning Herald published two yesterday, one of which came from... Melbourne.

Is this a first?

Is this a case of The Age, at least, finally standing up to THE LOBBY?

Is THE LOBBY, which has always relied on the oxygen given to it by an ignorant and spineless press, finally losing its clout?

The Emails are IN! 2

And here they are, right on time!

A big hand, folks, for Danny Samuels and Michael Jaku!

And a big hand for the Herald's letter editor (but not The Age's!), who saw fit to cast aside the letters of folks with real concerns so that these TWO Zionist propagandists could spin and obfuscate to their heart's content on the Herald's letters page.

It's all there: aggression redefined as defence; Israelis eternally trying to divest themselves of other peoples' lands (but using loopholes in UN resolutions to justify hanging on to them); Arabs who can only say no; Palestinians who are always walking away; selective facts; eternally generous Israeli offers; and mindless Palestinian terrorism.

Enjoy:

Danny Samuels, Malvern (Vic):

"Tony Walker writes that Israel's defensive war in 1967 didn't entitle it to permanently occupy the territory captured. In fact, Israel immediately offered to return most of the territory in return for peace, but the Arab League responded with its infamous 'three no's' - no recognition, no negotiation, no peace. UN Security Council 242 required Israel to withdraw from 'territories occupied', not all the territories occupied, in exchange for peace.

"When Egypt agreed to peace, Israel withdrew from the entire Sinai, more land than the rest of israel and the territories combined. Sadly, the Palestinians walked away from what was generally regarded as generous deals in 2000/1 (followed by mass terrorism) and in 2008, and when Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, it received thousands of rockets for its trouble.

"If the Palestinians genuinely accept Israel's right to exist, all other issues, including the settlements (which, as even the Palestinians admit, take up less than 2% of the West Bank) can be resolved.

Michael Jacku, Double Bay:

"Tony Walker asserts that Israel trebled the size of its territory after the 1967 war. Nowhere does he mention the not insignificant fact that Israel subsequently returned the Sinai Desert and Gaza Strip which together formed, overwhelmingly, the greatest part of the captured territory, and it did so at its own peril."

The Emails are IN!

Palestine/Israel is surely the only topic UNDER THE SUN about which a journalist feels he/she has to think twice before presenting the facts.

Here's Fairfax's Tony Walker, for example, writing an opinion piece about the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967, which, of course, is coming up for its 50th anniversary next month:

"On June 5, 1967, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against surrounding Arab states in retaliation for an Egyptian blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba." (Six-Day War has lasted 50 years and hostilities continue, Sydney Morning Herald, 29/5/17)

Such a statement, of course, is nothing if not unassailably factual, right?

 But, hey, since when have pro-Israel propagandists ever allowed unassailable facts to get in their way?

Which is why Walker goes to the trouble of adding:

"Anticipating criticism in the letters pages, let's assert that Israel was a victim of aggression by the Arabs led by Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, that it had every right to defend itself to the best of its ability and, in the process, make use of territory gained in the conflict to negotiate a just peace."

Well, if that isn't playing the Israeli devil's advocate and then some... But here's the thing, the bottom line, if you will, as Walker so clearly points out:

"What a smashing victory in 1967 did not entitle Israel to was to be a permanent occupier of territory and its people and settlers of land seized in defiance of international law."

No matter, our defenders of the indefensible, our 1967 denialists, have already fired off their editorial vollies to the SMH and The Age, and you'll see their concoctions on the letters pages tomorrow. Enjoy!

The ALP: Neither Principles Nor Brains

God I'm tired of the Australian Labor Party. We all know it's as devoid of principles as a fish is of feathers. But principles aside, what about brains?

OK, wrack yours and come up with just one ALP politician since Whitlam who could be said to have even the proverbial half-a-brain.

Struggling?

Maybe Barry Jones, former Science Minister (1983-90) of 'Knowledge Nation' fame, two-time National President of the ALP (1992-2000; 2005-2006, and now Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne comes to mind. Certainly, he's probably the nearest thing to Einstein to emerge from the ranks of the ALP, which, BTW, he joined in 1950.

I note that he recently (2015) appeared on The Conversation arguing that our political system was in crisis in part because of our politicians' refusal to analyse and explain complex problems. So what happens when Labor's supposed Einstein analyses the modern Middle East, which is one of the things he sets out to do in his 2016 book Knowledge, Courage, Leadership, under the heading Middle Eastern horrors?

Short answer: he screws up.

Some examples:

"After Islam swept through the Middle East, then North Africa and Spain... Christian Europe had limited understanding of the Muslim world, and failed to comprehend deep divisions between Sunnis (and the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect) and Sh'ites [sic], sectarian feuds about organisation and authority in Islam and interpretation of the Qu'ran [sic], which began in the generation after Muhammad's death (632)." (p 154)

Hello? The Wahhabis originated in 18th century Arabia.

"Britain resisted attempts to settle in Palestine large numbers of Jews displaced... from Europe in the 1930s, anxious to avoid offering [sic] Arabs and jeopardising access to oil." (p 155)

This statement is wholly incorrect. Following the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Britain oversaw the flooding of Palestine with Zionist settlers from Europe. She only sought to restrict the flow in 1939, after 3 years of Arab rebellion. In the words of the MacDonald White Paper of that year: "[T]he fear of the Arabs that this influx will continue indefinitely until the Jewish population is in a position to dominate them [has] made possible disturbances which have given a serious setback to economic progress, depleted the Palestine exchequer, rendered life and property insecure, and produced a bitterness between the Arab and Jewish populations which is deplorable..." The White Paper announced, therefore, that Jewish immigration into Palestine would henceforth be restricted to 75,000 over the next 5 years, and that after that, Jewish immigrants would only be allowed in with the acquiescence of the Palestinian Arabs.

"The creation of Israel (1948)... was a reaction to the horror and moral abyss of the Holocaust... Israel has been subject to constant threat ever since 1948, but it survives." (p 155)

This is patent nonsense. The Zionist movement had been scheming for the creation of 'Israel' from its inception in the 1890s, long before the Holocaust. The leadership of Palestine's armed Zionist gangs in late 40s Palestine were only interested in Holocaust survivors in so far as they could be used as cannon fodder to help wrest control of Palestine from its majority Arab population. 

And as for "constant threat" and "survival", one merely has to ask:

a) if you muscle in on someone else's patch, what the hell do you expect you're going to get in return, hugs and kisses?

b) if integrity of life and limb are really what matters to you (and who would deny it?) would you rather be an Israeli Jew or a Palestinian Arab?

"The Suez conflict (1916) in which Britain and France invaded Egypt to reclaim the Suez Canal, which had been nationalised by President Nasser." (p 156)

This is like a summary of World War II which mentions only Italy and Japan on the Axis side. The 1956 aggression against Egypt was the result of an Israeli-French-British conspiracy. On October 29, 1956, Israeli forces crossed into Sinai and raced towards the Suez Canal. A combined Anglo-French paratroop unit was dropped onto Port Said a week later, on November 4, prior to a planned advance on Ismailia and Suez.

"In June 1967 ('The Six Day War') Israel defeated invading forces from Egypt, Syria and Jordan." (p 156)

No, this is Israeli folklore. Israel struck the first blow when it attacked the Egyptian air force on the ground in a surprise pre-emptive attack on the morning of 5 June, 1967. This was followed by similar attacks on the Jordanian, Iraqi and Syrian air forces. As Israeli General Peled, Chief of Logistical Command during the war, wrote on 3 June, 1972 in Le Monde: "All those stories about the huge danger we were facing because of our small territorial size, an argument expounded once the war was over, have never been considered in our calculations. While we proceeded towards the full mobilisation of our forces, no person in his right mind could believe that all this force was necessary to our 'defence' against the Egyptian threat. This force was to crush once and for all the Egyptians at the military level and their Soviet masters at the political level. To pretend that the Egyptian forces concentrated on our borders were capable of threatening Israel's existence does not only insult the intelligence of any person capable of analysing this kind of situation, but is primarily an insult to the Israeli army."

Finally, there's this complete gibberish:

"In Jordan, the West funded and encouraged Hezbollah (jihadist + clean) to weaken Hamas (pragmatic + corrupt), presumably hoping that a fractured leadership would be helpful for Israel. Jordan had been essentially secularist but jihadism has become a significant force." (p 156)

To which one can only respond by asking, WTF was going on in his head when he wrote that?

Jones has been in retirement on a fat parliamentary pension for decades now. He has had all the time in the world (and supposedly the brains) to get the basics of modern Middle Eastern history right. If this, then, is the best our Einstein manque can do on the subject, what hope can we possibly expect from such intellectual pygmies as Shorten and crew?

Too Many Skeletons in the Closet

1) "More than 400 government documents have gone missing from the [UK] National Archives in the last 4 years. They include Foreign Office files from the 1970s* on 'military and nuclear collaboration with Israel' and a 1947 letter from Winston Churchill." (More than 400 government files missing from National Archives, Tom Bateman, bbc.com, 3/8/16)

2) "Israel is locking away millions of official documents to prevent the darkest episodes in its history from coming to light, civil rights activists and academics have warned as the country's state archives move online... Accusations of increased secrecy come as Israel marks this week the 49th anniversary of the 1967 war, when it seized and occupied Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank and Golan Heights. Many of the the records to which access is being denied refer to that war and the first years of Israel's military rule over Palestinians in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza... Nonetheless, some of the declassified material was revealing. Uzi Narkiss, who headed the army's central command at the time, suggested that he and other commanders hoped to ethnically cleanse most of the territories under cover of fighting. He told fellow officers: 'Within 72 hours we'll drive out all the Arabs from the West Bank'... One Israeli academic... has estimated that up to a third of records relating to the 1948 war that were declassified have been put under lock again. Given the large number of documents, many had yet to be examined by researchers." (Why Israel is blocking access to its archives, Jonathan Cook, aljazeera.com, 9/6/16)

[*1970-74 - Conservatives/ Heath; 1974-79 - Labour/ Wilson & Callaghan; 1979-83 - Conservatives/ Thatcher]

The Last Thing on Their Minds

Remember when the Middle East's only innocent bystander 'miraculously' acquired East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Egypt's Sinai and Syria's Golan Heights in just 6 days back in June 1967?

Remember how, in the words of Alan Dershowitz, "the only question was whether the Arab armies would be able to strike the first military blow"? (The Case for Israel, p 92)

Remember UK novelist Howard Jacobson telling us on Q&A in May 2011, "You often hear people talking about the occupation.... I don't know anyone who wants the occupation. I don't know any Israeli who wants the occupation. But people speak about it as if it just kind of happened. One day there was an occupation. Out of a clear, blue sky Jews dropped... Israeli people dropped down and said, 'We'll have that piece of land'. It's not what happened."? (See my 24/5/11 post Gunfight at the Q&A Corral.)

So much for the flimflam. Here's the reality: 

"The [Israeli] military archives have released generals' testimonies that put the reader on the ground during Israel's capture of Jerusalem's Old City in the 1967 Six-Day War... Further testimony released Sunday was by Maj. Gen. Uzi Narkiss, who headed Central Command during the war. He told how the IDF had plans for conquering the West Bank in three days. He remembered that before the war he had told reserve officers in the 4th Brigade: 'I don't know if something will happen, but if it does, within 72 hours we'll drive out all the Arabs from the West Bank.' On June 5, Narkiss received orders to prepare for war... Narkiss phoned [Israeli West] Jerusalem Mayor teddy Kolleck. 'It's war, everything's in order... You'll be mayor of a united Jerusalem. We're enjoying great success; the armored forces are already inside.' Narkiss' testimony details his efforts to get the army into Jerusalem's Old City... As Narkiss put it, 'Since I'm a Jerusalemite and know this thing and know the concept of lamenting a missed opportunity for generations, I said that now was the time to take Jerusalem.' He was referring to the failure to keep the Old City in 1948." (Israeli generals in 1967 war: concerned over Jerusalem looting, hoping to drive Arabs out of West Bank, Gil Cohen, Haaretz, 5/6/16)

The Tunnel Vision of Geraldine Brooks 2

I was sufficiently intrigued by Geraldine Brooks' Zionist myopia to check her out more fully. For what they're worth, here are a few bits and pieces I came across:

1) Geraldine Doogue interviews Brooks on the ABC's Compass program, 27/4/08 (The interpolations are mine.):

GD: Now you converted to Judaism from Catholicism. Why so?

GB: Well, actually from nothing. I had left Catholicism behind and I'd been cruising along as a merry atheist. And I guess I have to go back to my father. One of his great fascinations and passions in life grew out of the fact that during World War II he served in what was then Palestine. And because he was a passionate socialist leftie, he was of course attracted to the idea of the Kibbutz movement. And so this was very formative for him and this was one of the things that really animated him.

[So here was a bloke who mistook the colonising - think Jewish settlements today - Jews-only kibbutz movement for socialism, and ignored what was really going on in Palestine at the time. Zionist myopia seems to run in the family.]

I remember the first time I ever paid attention to a news story in the paper was during the Six Day War because Dad cared so passionately about all these places that he'd been to. And I remember when I was about 14 or 15 I would ostentatiously haul around these dog-eared copies of The Rise & Fall of the Third Reich. I could recite Yevtushenko's Babi Yar and I started wearing a Star of David. So there was this kind of engagement, I think, with the history of the Jews that remained a kind of interest of mine.

[Obviously, Dad didn't have the wherewithal to distinguish between Judaism and political Zionist triumphalism. Hence young Geraldine's rushing around, fantasising about a second holocaust, while Israel's engaged in its second great land grab (West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, Golan Heights, Sinai) of the 20th century. Now here we are, 48 years on, with Israeli settlements mushrooming, and there's no evidence that I can find that she's learnt anything new on the subject. Pathetic.]

And then, when I fell in love with a Jewish man [US writer Tony Horwitz], and we were planning to be married, I just couldn't bring myself to be the end of the line for his heritage.

[OMG, is she for real?]

GD: What do you mean?

GB: Well, Judaism is passed through the maternal line - a fact that I've always found engaging for its pragmatism as well as for its feminist implications - but if I had married him and not converted then our children would not be considered Jewish.

GD: Did he care?

GB: He didn't give two hoots! (They both laugh.) But it was just something that I felt that I wanted to do because I didn't want to be another instrument in the shadow of the Shoah, of destroying a Jewish family that had made it through the sack of Jerusalem by the Romans all the way to the end of the 20th century.

[OMFG, she is for real! The Romans FFS!]

2) You'll note the reference to feminism. Brooks is big on feminism, but some, to put it mildly, aren't too impressed. Here's an extract from the Australian-Palestinian novelist Randa Abdel-Fatteh's review of Brooks' 1994 book Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women:

"In perhaps the most astonishing display of veil fetishism in the book, Brooks reflects on her visit to Gaza, where it is as if a brutal military occupation does not exist. The reader is instead regaled with more stories about sexuality and veiling. Brooks says, 'The struggle had changed and so had Gaza. Driving from the huge military roadblock that divides the Gaza Strip from Israel, I hadn't seen a single unveiled woman.' It is astounding that Brooks, a feminist and journalist who purports to be concerned about the situation of Muslim women and human rights abuses, can only summon a comment about the veil in her assessment of her trip to Gaza. Brooks displays no interest in the impact of Israel's occupation on the lives of Palestinian women - the violation of their basic human rights, the impediments that the occupation places on their choices, freedom of movement, and their access to education and health services, as examples. What matters to the classic Orientalist is what Muslim women wear, and that any oppression they suffer must be due to Islam." (Griffith Review)

3) By their tweets ye shall know them: here's one of Brooks' from 18/6:

"Congrats. But please stop releasing balloons, which end up in the ocean killing marine life."

Now while this is a sentiment I agree with, I note that Israel's genocidal war on Gaza last year elicited not a peep/tweet from Brooks. Did she, I wonder, think about the women of Gaza she'd met in the 90s? Too busy dreaming of Davo?

Her retweeting of the following Horwitz tweet, however, is telling - of both:

"Iraq was always 3 nations and should become so again. Kurdistan already set, divide rest between Shiite and Sunni before it's full civil war." (14/6/14)

4) Horwitz, himself, is a little more forthcoming on Gaza. Here's his idea of an appropriate comment on the Gaza massacres:

"My Middle East peace plan. Text everyone to leave and pour sand over the entire region." (29/7/14).

And here's another example of his talent for smartarsery:

"Mideast progress: Miss Lebanon refers to photo-bombing contestant as Miss Israel rather than 'Miss Zionist Entity'" (20/1/15)

Needless to say, The Secret Chord was given the thumbs up in a review in Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald and should sell like the proverbial hotcakes. Alas, such is the way of the world.

Children of a Lesser God 1

Richard Crossman was a British Labor MP and socialist intellectual. In 1946, he was appointed a member of the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry - a body charged with finding a solution to Britain's most astonishing own-goal, the Palestine PROBLEM. In his book on the committee's work and findings, Palestine Mission (1946), he wrote as follows:

"I found... that my mind had been made up during our weeks in Palestine, on the conflicting claims of Jews and Arabs. I accepted Dr Weizmann's analysis. The choice was between two injustices, and we had to decide which injustice was the lesser. Looking at the position of the Palestinian Arab, I had to admit that no western colonist in any other country had done so little harm, or disturbed so little the life of the indigenous people. Arab patriotism and Arab self-respect had been deeply affronted and would continue to be affronted by the development of the [Jewish] national home; but if I believed in social progress I had to admit that the Jews had set going revolutionary forces in the Middle East which, in the long run, would benefit the Arabs. It was by reacting to the Zionist invader that the Arab was learning to fend for himself in an industrial world. He had been cheated and duped and imposed on by the west, and he would remain violently resentful for some time to come; but I was convinced that all this was a lesser injustice which must be accepted for the sake of the building of a Jewish Commonwealth. Of course, the injustice must be reduced to a minimum and I rejected for that reason the demand of the Zionists to include in a Jewish state the wholly Arab mountain areas. [MERC: He means today's West Bank.*] I do not think I would have reached this conclusion if the national home had merely been a national home. In Palestine I had come to realize that it was something more - a socialist commonwealth, intensely democratic, intensely collectivist, and strong enough to fend for itself." (pp 176-77)

In keeping with the Eurocentric, colonial mentality which characterised Labor leftists of his ilk, Crossman was obviously so overawed by the collective effort and material progress evident in the immigrant Zionist movement's showcase colonies as to overlook the simple fact that the indigenous Palestinian Arab majority was being prevented from exercising its fundamental right of national self-determination.

His facile assumption that the Palestinian Arabs would somehow "benefit" from Zionist colonisation, a staple of the Zionist propaganda of the day, would not, of course, stand the test of time. Within three years of Crossman penning the above words, the bulk of Palestine's indigenous Arab majority would be expelled from its ancestral homeland by armed Zionist terror gangs. Whether Crossman had anything to say about that after the event I simply do not know.

I leave it to another observer, the British journalist and civil servant, Owen Tweedy, writing in February 1949, to describe the aftermath:

"Meanwhile well over 100,000 Israeli immigrants from Europe have already arrived [in Israel]. Many have been drafted into the fighting forces, and homes for some 40,000 others have been found in vacated Arab towns, villages and farms. The official scale of further arrivals has been announced at the rate of 100,000 a year until the total of the newcomers reaches at least the million mark; and all will require Lebensraum. As a result of all these processes and plans, the old Palestine of the last 30 years is, I am told, being - as it were - rapidly rubbed clean off the slate.. Buoyant Israel has spread over at least two-thirds of the tiny country, and the remaining third... has lost all geographic identity and is now little more than the last refuge in Palestine for some 320,000 Arab refugees from the evacuated Arab towns and villages now in Israeli occupation. A further 480,000 are herded in hundreds of thousands in the Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan and Iraq.

"The last estimate of the Arab population in Palestine was in the neighbourhood of 1,250,000 persons. Today 800,000 of them have lost their Palestinian homes. Thus in the fruitful nine months since the British Mandate ended last May the State of Israel has been born and, on the other side of the account, the problem of a displaced Palestinian Arab population has been created on a scale reminiscent of the worst of wartime in Europe. This outcome invites a sad reference to the Balfour Declaration of November 2nd, 1917. 'His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish People and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of that object, it being understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.' The Declaration was endorsed by the League of Nations and by America. Today, 32 years later, about two-thirds of these non-Jewish (i.e. Arab) communities are homeless and adrift and, to all effect and purpose, stateless.

"Their plight is grim. None of the neighbouring Arab countries where they are camped had the resources or facilities to cater for such a sudden increase of population. Transjordan, for instance, with a population of its own of only 300,000, was called on to feed and house 100,000 refugees. A majority of these derelicts are women and children unaccompanied by men. They come mostly from the ranks of the very poor. They have now lost even the very little they ever had and are helpless and hopeless. Most of their camps, thanks to a timely gift from the British Government, are now tented; but this February is exceptionally severe in the Middle East, and existence in a tent in the bleak highlands of Judaea, Samaria and Transjordan against driving snow must be a terrible ordeal. To relieve day-to-day distress some financial help to buy stores and food has come from the British Government, from funds of the Secretariat of U.N.O. and from charitable organisations here and in the Middle East. The distribution of relief is now undertaken on the spot by the International Red Cross, the American Friends' Service Committee and the League of Red Cross Societies. They are helped magnificently by local volunteer workers - most of them Arab reinforced by British and others. And much has been done. But constructive relief is handicapped by delay - delay in voting Governmental grants from the West; delay in U.N.O. decisions, and local transport delays. The outcome is a woeful shortage - on the one hand of essential supervisory staff; on the other of food itself, and of medical stores, clothing and camp equipment - and disease and illness are taking a heavy toll of life." (The Arab expulsion, Owen Tweedy, The Spectator, 25/2/49)

[*Here's Crossman writing in his Diaries of a Cabinet Minister (1976), June 5, 1967: "Back from the Chamber in my room I was delighted to have a visit from Remez, the Israeli Ambassador... He gave me a very full and accurate briefing on how hostilities started. I asked him about Israeli intentions towards Jordan and he replied that they intended to occupy the hills of Samaria but gave me an assurance that they would not occupy the whole West Bank because they want King Hussein of Jordan to survive... 'Do you really mean that about the West Bank?' 'Yes,' he said, 'we don't want to get 600,000 Arabs inside Israel. All we need is the triangle and the Samaria hills'." A footnote at the bottom of the page (365, Volume 2) reads: "By the end of the week the Jews had occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem."]

To be continued...

Massacre & Incident

Another book review* by Paul Monk in The Australian. Here's how it begins:

"'Barely in modern times has so short and localised a conflict had such prolonged, global consequences,' Michael B. Oren wrote in the opening paragraph of Six Days of War (2002),** his compelling history of the June 1967 conflict in which Israel crushed its Arab neighbours and seized control of Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. He listed some of those consequences: the Black September incident in Jordan (1970), the Munich massacre of Israeli athletes (1972)..." (Partial gaps in revisionist critique of Israel, 4/10/14)

So when 11 Israelis are killed it's a massacre, but when nearly 3,500 Palestinians are killed it's merely an incident.***

Why would you bother reading on?

[*Cursed Victory: A History of Israel & the Occupied Territories, by Ahron Bregman; **From Norman Finkelstein's 2002 review of Oren, Abba Eban with footnotes: "Whenever Israel faces a public relations crisis in the US - ie, a jot of the reality of its brutal policies manages to break free of ideological controls - a new propaganda initiative is launched to lift the spirits and close the ranks of the Zionist faithful. After Israel's bloody invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, the Zionist book of the month was Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial. Soon after the Palestinians entered into revolt in September 2000 and Israel unleashed a new round of violent repression, From Time Immemorial - although definitively shown to have been a hoax - was reissued and soared to the top of the Amazon list, soon followed by Oren's book (Amazon frequently featured them together). While certainly a much more sophisticated enterprise, Six Days of War serves the same political agenda as From Time Immemorial. In the introduction Oren states as his goal that the June war 'never be seen the same way again.' In fact he simply repeats the same old, tired apologetics. Like From Time Immemorial, its real purpose is to reclaim the lost world of Zionist heroism and innocence. With so much water under the bridge, however, except among true believers (admittedly not a small number) it's unlikely to succeed."; ***See my 14/8/12 post Bob Carr Rewrites Jordanian History.]

Bulls in Rut

"The generals were in their forties, family men, but they clung to the Israeli culture of youth; they were like adolescent boys or bulls in rut. They believed in force and they wanted war. War was their destiny. Almost 20 years had passed since the army had won glory in the War of Independence, and 10 years since the victory in the Sinai. They had a limited range of vision and they believed that war was what Israel needed at the moment, not necessarily because they felt the country's existence was in danger, as they wailed in an almost 'Diaspora' tone, but because they believed it was an opportunity to break the Egyptian army." (1967: Israel, the War & the Year that Transformed the Middle East, 2007, p 296)

That's how Israeli historian Tom Segev describes the uniformed Israeli thugs who launched the fateful war of June 1967 which led to East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Syrian Golan Heights and the Egyptian Sinai coming under Israeli occupation.

Their counterparts today, of course, have no problem whatever with the Egyptian army. In fact, it now does police duty for Israel in the Sinai.

No, their target of opportunity today is Hamas (and its unity deal with Fatah).

Today's Israeli bulls in rut will, of course, be wailing (through their PR mouthpieces) about Hamas rockets, but don't be fooled, that's just the pretext. It's Palestinian blood they're really after, and they're pawing the (stolen Palestinian) earth beneath their feet, slavering in anticipation of spilling it deep inside the besieged and impoverished Gaza Ghetto.

The current aerial assault is just the beginning of 'Operation Protective Edge', as this particular wilding has been risibly called, and follows on from the charade of its predecessor, 'Operation Brother's Keeper', in which the Palestinian population of the occupied West Bank was turned upside down (6 Palestinians killed/hundreds arrested) for weeks in a 'search' for 3 kidnapped Israeli settler youth whom Israeli authorities knew all along had been murdered and by whom. This massive exercise in collective punishment (including some preliminary 'softening up' in Gaza) was, of course, accompanied by an equally massive 'Bring back our boys!' propaganda campaign designed to whip up international sympathy and pave the way for the genocidal ground attack to come. (See Who started 'the cycle of violence' in Palestine? Justin Raimondo, antiwar.com, 8/7/14)

Already the war crimes are evident:

"Israeli forces killed six children when a missile struck the home of alleged Hamas activist Odeh Ahmad Kaware in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, Defence of Children International reported. The five families living in the building evacuated after an Israeli aerial drone fired a warning missile, however a number of neighbours gathered on the roof in an effort to prevent the bombing. Despite their presence an Israeli air strike levelled the building, killing seven people including six children and injuring 28 others." (25 killed as Israel prepares for ground assault, Ruth Pollard, The Age, 9/7/14)

So much for all the claptrap that's spoken about passive, nonviolent resistance in the face of Israeli aggression. It's like a red rag to a bull (that simile again!) as far as the Israelis are concerned. I'm reminded here of an earlier confrontation, during the first Intifada (1987-93) when Israeli troops still garrisoned Gaza:

"In Shifa Hospital... there had been pandemonium the day of the accident, December 9, 1987, when it was thought the truck driver meant to kill the Palestinians.* IDF troops stormed the hospital, as if it were a citadel and the day was theirs. Shifa was crowded with the injured, their families, friends and neighbors. [Dr Ahmed Yasgi] could only use his eyes to summon the horror he wanted so much to describe. 'The army was beating patients in front of the doctors and assaulting the medical teams. I saw a patient being knocked down and said: 'Oh, stop - stop.' The soldiers punched me on the shoulder in front of two little girls. Ten times we were trying to protect the staff but the army didn't respect anyone. And a man was killed inside the hospital on December fifteenth. Yes, Ibrahim Al-Sakhla. He came with his wife who was one month pregnant.' He thought that 50 to 100 soldiers were inside the hospital that day, on a sweep for suspects, or anyone whose face annoyed them. The sight of rampaging soldiers enraged one Gazan man with his wife, pushed him into a moment of white fury, so that he made a reckless last stand. The man opened his shirt and faced a soldier less than 32 feet away, as if the two of them were alone on a stage, and it was he who must speak first. 'If you want to kill anyone then kill me!' the Palestinian shouted. Fifteen people were watching. The soldier knew how to answer and fired. Ibrahim Sakhla lurched into the arms of Dr Yasgi, needing to speak. He said something about his wife and began his death." (Gaza: A Year in the Intifada: A Personal Account from an Occupied Land, Gloria Emerson,  1991, pp 195-96)

[*The first Intifada was triggered in Gaza when an Israeli army truck struck a car killing 4 Palestinians.]

The Unpalatable Truth About Martha Gellhorn 5

Fast forward to July 1967, in the wake of Israel's conquest of the remaining 22% of historic Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza Strip), Syria's Golan Heights, and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula in the so-called Six Day War. True to form, Gellhorn was there, whitewashing the suffering of a new wave of Palestinian refugees, many of whom were also refugees from the 1948 era.

The following extract comes from her essay Why the Refugees Ran*, included in a 1988 collection of her essays called The Face of War. We see again the Palestinian straw man of her 1961 propaganda piece (joined on this occasion by a Palestinian straw woman); the hoary Zionist myth of Palestinians as witless pawns of Arab radio broadcasts; the always kind and thoroughly decent Israelis at a complete loss as to what has gotten into these people; and the usual apologetics for Israeli aggression:

"Aquabat [sic] Jaber and the neighboring Jericho camps are now ghost towns though probably most of the residents will filter back. No other mass exodus happened anywhere else in West Jordan and it is fishy. The lightning war was not heard even as a passing bang in this valley. The camp leader, himself a Palestinian refugee, is a choleric fat man, a powerful UNRWA administrator, feared and obeyed by his people... Why didn't he prevent this panic flight? We insisted that there must have been some sort of trouble to drive the people away.

"'No, no. The battle lasted an hour, far off,' the camp leader said. 'There was nothing here. No, no, the Israeli army did not come here at all; everything is all right; everything is correct. There are plenty of supplies. There is no trouble.'

"Since non-war had been followed by instant peace, why did the refugees run? 'People talk,' the camp leader said. 'There were a lot of stories. Political party people spread rumors. They said all the young men would be killed. People heard on the radio that this is not the end, only the beginning, so they think maybe it will be a long war and they want to be in Jordan.'

"A group of sullen young men were sitting in a cafe; they tuned in to Radio Cairo as we passed. Perhaps Radio Cairo and all it stands for, Arab politics and propaganda, are the true reason for the first frantic rush of of camp refugees into a second exile across the Jordan. They were not escaping the danger of war, nor fleeing their shattered homes. There are 20 UNRWA refugee camps in West Jordan, not one of them was touched by the war; not one resident was killed (Statement made by UNRWA's chief representative in West Jordan, during an interview on July 4 at Kalandia, which confirmed my own observations.)... I suggest that blind fear of the Israelis, not the dangers of war, was their driving emotion. Radio Cairo had promised destruction of the Jews. King Hussein's last broadcast before his ceasefire is memorable. 'Kill the Jews wherever you find them. Kill them with your hands, with your nails and teeth.' Now the Jews had won, so the Jews would kill them instead.

"The majority of Palestinian refugees do not live in camps. Any of these, like any other Arabs who were exposed to actual war, may have decided to escape immediately lest the fighting go on or start again and trap them in danger. Perhaps some of the first wave of refugees had valid, political reasons for leaving, unlike the later waves of stoical departing Arabs.

"In the last few weeks, neither fear of war nor fear of reprisals nor family nor financial complications explain the smaller but steady flow of people plodding over the Allenby Bridge, no matter what the waiting hardships of exile. 'They don't feel secure,' said an intelligent Palestinian woman on UNRWA's staff in Hebron. 'They don't know what is going to happen next. They want to be among Arabs.' She surprised me by remarking that the local Israeli military commander had been 'very kind to UNRWA, very gentle and helpful,' amazing words for an Arab to use about a Jew. The commander had provided a car for their work, and truck transport for refugee women, children and old people to the Allenby Bridge. I surprised her by remarking that this truck transport, a gesture of decency in the white heat of summer, had been transmuted through propaganda into forced expulsion. If the Israeli army had tried at any moment to prevent the exodus, that would have been treated as forced detention." (pp 297-98)

And how's this for pious claptrap (Forty-six years on, note Gellhorn's advice not to "harass Israel for an overnight solution."):

"Hopefully, the Jordanian and Israeli governments will be able to co-operate... on the return of all those refugees who chose to come back to West Jordan. UNRWA's 'educated guess,' here, is that 100,000** of its West Jordan refugees are now on the east bank... It would be wise and restful not to harass Israel for an overnight solution of the 19-year-old Palestine refugee problem. With time, work, and money, the Israelis will manage simply by treating their acquired Palestine refugee population as people, not as political pawns." (p 298)

That Gellhorn is little more here than a peddler of Israeli propaganda becomes patently obvious when contrasted with the findings of research carried out by American University of Beirut sociologists Peter Dodd and Halim Barakat in September 1967, and set out in their report, River Without Bridges: A Study of the Exodus of the 1967 Palestinian Arab Refugees (The Institute for Palestine Studies, 1969).

Here is the conclusion from Chapter 5, The Exodus: Its Direct & Indirect Causes:

"It is now time to attempt to answer our original question. Why did the exodus of 1967 take place? The answer is that the exodus was a response to the severe situational pressures existing at the time. The situational pressures were generated by the aerial attacks upon a defenseless country, including the extensive use of napalm, the occupation of the West Bank villages by the Israeli army, and the actions of the occupying forces. Certainly the most drastic of these actions was the eviction of civilians and the deliberate destruction of a number of villages. Other actions, such as threats and the mass detention of male civilians, also created situational pressures.

"For a number of reasons, which we have termed indirect causes, the Arab villages were not well equipped to resist these situational pressures. They were caught by surprise, ill-informed and unfamiliar with the terrifying nature of aerial bombardment. Their family-centred social structure decreased attachment to community and to nation. They fled to protect their families, including, and by no means least, the honor of their womenfolk.

"It is our opinion that the fears felt by the Arab villagers were not unreasonable. They are intelligible and explicable. One does not need to view the exodus of June 1967 as a mass panic of superstitious and ignorant people. It seems more reasonable to see the exodus as the response of the Palestinian Arab villagers to the conditions of enemy attack and occupation. In an earlier section of this report, we have presented our finding that the refugee families had strong ties with their home communities: ties of property, of affection, of kinship and of long residence. It is perhaps a measure of the strength of the 'situational pressures' that the families left their homes in spite of these ties. To explain it as a panic does not do justice to the strength of community ties, nor does it explain the cause of the exodus." (pp 54-55)

Israeli historian Tom Segev's book 1967: Israel, the War & the Year That Transformed the Middle East (2007) presents Gellhorn's beautiful Israelis in a very different light, one more in keeping with the Israelis we have all come to - ahem - know and love today.

Segev reveals that a range of strategies, both passive and active, was used by the Israelis to stimulate flight and depopulate the West Bank: The roads leading to Jordan's Allenby Bridge were kept open. The bridge itself was not immediately destroyed. Buses and trucks were made available to speed up the exodus, not as a humanitarian gesture as Gellhorn has it. Again, despite her assertion to the contrary, refugee camps in the Jericho area were bombed, and columns of fleeing refugees were fired on. Vehicles equipped with loudspeakers disseminating disinformation designed to spook civilians into flight, made the rounds of West Bank towns and villages. Hundreds of homes were destroyed in the town of Kalkilya. The villages of Beit Awa and Beit Mirsim in the Hebron area were destroyed. The inhabitants of  3 villages in the Latrun salient, Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba, were expelled and the villages razed. Large numbers of young men were rounded up in Tul Karem and detained. Harassing night searches of Palestinian homes by Israeli troops were instituted. The aim was simply to drive home the message: get out! (Segev, pp 403-407)

Gellhorn, apparently, heard nothing of this. And anyway, why spoil a beautiful friendship with Israel's hero du jour, Defence Minister Moshe Dayan.*** 

Finally, on the subject of her fanciful speculation about refugees attempting to "filter back," those who tried were simply shot on sight. Only a limited number were later allowed to return as a PR exercise. (Segev, p 540-542)

To be concluded in my next post... 

[*Written for the UK Guardian; *Dodd & Barakat estimate the number of 'old [1948] refugees' at 100,000 and the 'new refugees' at 100,000. Later estimates rise to well over 300,000; *** Moorehead, p 426]