Over the next few days I intend posting - in 4 parts - an important critique - Justice Evatt & Palestine: The Limits of Justice - of Australian Labor Party icon, Herbert Vere Evatt's role in the United Nations' partition, and therefore criminal destruction, of Arab Palestine, in 1947. It was written in the 80s by Caroline Graham, Lecturer in Politics, Faculty of Humanities, University of Technology in Sydney. I am not aware, apart from my own posts on the subject of Evatt, of any other attempt to take Evatt to task on this subject. Given that pro-Zionist Labor politicians invariably cite Evatt's deplorable role in the partition of Palestine, and hence the creation of the state of Israel, with pride, Graham's critical analysis should be read by everyone. Here is Part 1:
"To his old man Foreign Affairs was big time. Heroic figures. A conversation on that subject nearly always led to talk of Herb Evatt, his father's only Australian hero, to talk of his work for the UN, and how Robert Menzies had finally destroyed him."
That quotation from a short story by Greek Australian Angelo Loukakis encapsulates the strong feelings of reverence, combined with sympathy, aroused by Evatt in most progressive Australians. He was our hero, destroyed by the forces of darkness and reaction.
On the question of Palestine, added to Evatt's status and martyrdom has been the fact of bipartisan and broad support for the state of Israel, and so it is easy to understand why no serious critique of Evatt's leading role in the UN's 1947 decision to partition Palestine has been attempted.
It is an unpleasant task to highlight the mistakes of a national hero, but perhaps it is time to take a closer look at what was in my view the greatest blunder of his career, in both a moral and a legal sense. His active promotion of the partition of Palestine was the action in which he swung furthest away from his own ideal of a reign of international law and justice, implemented through the UNO.
The decision itself and the process at the UN by which it was reached actually subverted international law and basic legal principles. This did not go unremarked - a number of eminent international lawyers and diplomats, amongst others, expressed serious reservations and criticisms at the time.
With the benefit of hindsight we also have to add that partition has never been implemented. It is and always was unworkable without the support, however lukewarm, of the parties to the conflict. Then as now, neither Jewish nor Palestinian leaders have supported partition except for temporary tactical reasons and Evatt's "fair and just solution" still lies on the drawing board of history.
Before embarking on a detailed critique, I will summarize Evatt's role in what he once called "the Palestine job." It is well known that Evatt, as Minister for External Affairs in the Curtin-Chifley Labor government from 1941-9, had thrown himself wholeheartedly into the postwar formation of the UNO. By the late 40s his reputation there was such that he knew he could achieve the honour of becoming President of the UN General Assembly (UNGA). Indeed, he won the presidential election of 1948. That he regarded this as the crowning point of his career is emphasised by the epitaph on his gravestone in Canberra Cemetery, which reads simply : "President of the United Nations General Assembly." None of his other distinctions rates a mention.
He had been a candidate for the 1947 presidential term but had narrowly lost out to Dr Aranha of Brazil. Evatt made it known that he would stand for 1948, and Dr Aranha wanted to assist him. Naturally it would be in Evatt's interest to take some prominent and helpful role in the UN arena in the lead up to the next presidential election. He was already chairing the UN Atomic Energy Commission in 1947, but the urgent problem of Palestine emerged early in that year as the most dramatic and high profile issue facing the UN in the next UNGA session.
In April 1947 the British Labour Government, unable to stem the violence in Palestine dumped the problem in the lap of the UN. The UNGA immediately convened a Special Session to confront this development. After a fortnight of hearing from Palestinian, Arab and Jewish leaders a Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) was appointed to investigate further and to recommend a solution to the next regular UNGA session in September. (It's important in this narrative to know that the UNGA's regular annual session are from September to the end of November, and that it is obviously extremely difficult to convene at any other times.)
UNSCOP consisted of representatives from 11 middle ranking or third world nations, including Australia. After conducting hearings in Palestine, boycotted by Palestinians and other Arabs in accordance with their rejection of the UN's competence to decide on the future of Palestine, it completed its report on 31st August.
"It recommended unanimously that the mandate should be terminated and independence granted at the earliest possible date; that the economic unity of Palestine should be preserved; that the sacred character of the Holy Places should be safeguarded and access to them assured; and that the General Assembly should immediately make an international arrangement for solving the urgent problem of the 250,000 displaced European Jews in Europe... A majority of 8 members proposed the partition of Palestine into independent Arab and Jewish States and an International City of Jerusalem, to be administered under permanent United Nations trusteeship... A minority of 3 members [India, Iran Yugoslavia], all with substantial Moslem populations, called for an independent federal government with Jerusalem as [its] capital and for Arab and Jewish states having jurisdiction over such matters as education, social services, public health and agriculture... The Arab Higher Committee rejected both partition and a federal state. The Jewish Agency accepted UNSCOP's majority proposal as an 'indispensable minimum'." (1. Margaret Arakie, The Broken Sword of Justice, 1973, pp 55-58)
The significance of the partition proposal for both Arabs and Jews is clearly spelt out by British historian David Hirst:
"For the Zionists, the Partition Plan ranked, as a charter of legitimacy, with the Balfour Declaration which., in their view, it superseded and fulfilled. Certainly, it was a no less partisan document. Palestine comprises some 10,000 square miles. Of this. the Arabs were to retain 4,300 square miles while the Jews, who represented one-third of the population and owned some 6% of the land, were allotted 5,700 square miles. The Jews also got the better land; they were to have the fertile coastal belt while the Arabs were to make do, for the most part, with the hills. Yet it was not the size of the area allotted to the Jews which pleased them - indeed, they regarded it as the 'irreducible minimum' which they could accept - it was rather the fact of statehood itself. Conversely, it was not merely the size of the area they were to lose, it was the loss pf land, sovereignty and an antique heritage that angered the Arabs. The Partition Plan legitimized what had been, on any but the most partisan interpretation of the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate, illegitimately acquired. The past was, as it were, wiped out. Overnight, the comity of nations solemnly laid the foundations of a new moral order by which the Jews, the great majority of whom had been in Palestine less than 30 years, were deemed to ave claims equal, indeed superior, to those of the Arabs who had lived there from time immemorial." (2. The Gun & the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the middle East, 1977, p 132)
Equally important, as Hirst points out, "the proposed Jewish State was... to contain more Arabs - 509,780 - than Jews - 499,020." (ibid, p 133)
On receiving the UNSCOP's recommendation the General Assembly formed a special Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question (on which all member states were represented) to reach a conclusion on the recommendation as soon as possible. Divided into 3 sub-committees, the first (consisting of 9 member states, including the US and the Soviet Union) supported partition. The second (composed of the 6 Arab states, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Colombia) drew up plans for a unitary state. The third focused on the forlorn hope of reconciliation.
Evatt was elected chairman of the committee. In his own words: "This committee was to be a committee not of any limited character but comprising everyone of the 57 nations. Accordingly its decisions would probably determine the final UN Assembly vote on the Palestine question and indeed this proved to be the case... (Dr Aranha) assured me that they were all anxious that I should accept the responsibility: " I tell you most sincerely that the future of the Assembly depends on the success of the Palestine Committee and in the interests of the United Nations I ask you to do the job." ... I was also alive to the fact, and Dr Aranha did not attempt to conceal it, that the Palestine job was the "hot potato" in the Assembly and that quite a few of the delegates were expressing the opinion, perhaps the hope, that the proceedings of the committee would end in deadlock... I was greatly impressed by Aranha's point of view. He was tremendously keen on success of the 1947 Assembly. It seemed to me that if the United Nations could reach a fair and just solution of the Palestine question, it would greatly increase its own power and prestige; it would make history well worth making." (3. H.V. Evatt, Task of Nations, 1949, pp 129-131)
As history shows, the Special Committee was expertly and energetically chaired by Evatt, often holding as many as 3 meetings a day in order to rush proceedings through by the end of November. This time the Palestinians and other Arabs decided not to boycott the process, and the committee heard from a lengthy line-up of speakers from both sides.
Towards the end of November the committee began to vote on a number of divisive issues. First came the question of whether the UN had jurisdiction to reach a decision on the future government of Palestine - this was only narrowly won. A proposal that the whole question of jurisdiction should be put before the International Court of Justice was narrowly lost.
Then came the vital vote on the UNSCOP partition plan. Of the 57 votes, 25 were in favour and 13 against, with 19 abstentions. Thus the partition proposal went forward to the UNGA and it was a foregone conclusion that this voting pattern would be closely repeated in that forum, with exactly the same membership. However, in accordance with UN by-laws, this was a vote on a substantive issue and so would require a majority of two-thirds of the votes of the plenary Assembly.
It is not within the scope of this paper to describe the pressures which were now exerted on a small and dependent member states like Haiti, the Philippines and Liberia to change their votes. This scandal has been documented by a number of writers and participants. The taking of the vote was postponed by the UN Secretary General Trygve Lie apparently for no other reason than to allow the arm-twisting to continue behind the scenes. At the last possible moment before the 1947 UNGA session was adjourned, partition won by 33 votes to 13, with 10 abstentions.
In Australia, Evatt has received voluminous praise for his role in all this. For example, Alan Renouf has written: "no better testimony exists to Evatt's pursuit of justice than the part he played in the establishment of the state of Israel." (4. Let Justice Be Done: The Foreign Policy of H.V. Evatt, 1983) The Zionist lobby were especially fulsome: for example, Rieke Cohen, then president of the Women's International Zionist Organisation branch in Australia, called Evatt "an instrument of God for the rebirth of the Jewish state." (5. Quoted in Max Freilich, Zion in Our Time: Memoirs of an Australian Zionist, 1967) Evatt's biographers - Kylie Tennant, Alan Renouf, and Allan Dalziel - do not suggest that there could be another side to the story, let alone that Evatt may have erred.
However I will take up three issues surrounding the case, and Evatt's role, which I think call for critical analysis. These are the problem of Evatt's bias or interest in the outcome; the question of UN competence to recommend partition of a country; and the question of the failure of the Special Committee to refer the case to the International Court of Justice. (Evatt was in a position to exert a major influence in deliberations on the latter two issues).
Next installment: Evatt's Bias
Showing posts with label David Hirst. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Hirst. Show all posts
Saturday, March 10, 2018
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Unsentimental Israelis
Today is the 58th anniversary of Israel's infamous Kafr Qassem massacre. The following reference to it, in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald, unfortunately hardly does justice to the gravity of the crime:
"Israeli President Reuven Rivlin has acknowledged past and present wrongdoings to his country's Arabs... Mr Rivlin spoke at a memorial ceremony for victims of the 1956 massacre at Kafr Qassem, where Israeli forces killed 47 residents of the Israeli Arab village for breaking a wartime curfew, becoming the first Israeli president to attend the event. 'A terrible crime was committed here,' he said. 'The brutal killings in Kafr Qassem are an anomalous [?!] and sorrowful chapter in the history of the relations between Arabs and Jews living here... Kafr Qassam is adjacent to the West Bank. In 1956, it was under [Israeli] military rule and, on October 29 - the first day of a war with Egypt - Israeli border policemen gunned down residents who were unaware a curfew had been imposed... The Kafr Qassem massacre is taught in the Israeli education system as a case of an illegal military order that must be refused by soldiers." (Killings were crime against Israeli Arabs, says president, AFP/Sydney Morning Herald, 28/10/14)
Notice how, in the ms media, Israel almost always manages to come up smelling like roses? Funny, that.
By way of contextualising the final sentence in the AFP report, I draw your attention to the following finding by Israeli educationist Nurit Peled-Elhanan:
"The Kaffer Kassem massacre is remembered in Jewish-Israeli consciousness mainly for being the source for the court's unprecedented ruling against compliance with 'manifestly unlawful orders' [but Israeli textbooks] failed to mention that the verdict was not carried out to its term and said nothing about the suffering of the villagers." (Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology & Propaganda in Education, 2012, p 172)
The following account of the massacre and its aftermath by British scholar David Hirst shows why:
"The Arabs remember Kafr Qasem as the Deir Yassin of the established State. Less revealing, perhaps, than the event itself was the reaction it generated. On 29 October 1956, on the eve of Israel's invasion of Egypt, a detachment of Frontier Guards imposed a curfew on villages near the Jordanian frontier. Among them was Kafr Qasem. The Mukhtar was informed of the curfew just half an hour before it was due to go into effect. It was therefore quite impossible for him to pass the message on to the villagers who would be returning, as dusk fell, from their various places of work. Major Shmuel Melinki, the detachment commander, had foreseen this eventuality, and he asked his superior, Brigadier Yshishkhar Shadmi, what should be done about anyone coming home in ignorance of the curfew. The Brigadier had replied: 'I don't want any sentimentality... that's just too bad for him.' And there was no sentimentality. In the first hour of the curfew, between 5 and 6 o'clock, the Frontier Guards killed 47 villagers. They had returned home individually or in batches. A few came on foot, but most travelled by bicycle, mule cart or lorry. They included women and children. But all the Frontier Guards wanted to know was whether they were from Kafr Qasem. For if they were, they shot them down at close range with automatic weapons. 'Of every group of returning workers, some were killed and others wounded; very few succeeded in escaping unhurt. The proportion of those killed increased, until, of the last group, which consisted of 14 women, a boy and 4 men, all were killed, except one girl, who was seriously wounded.' The slaughter might have gone on like this had not Lieutenant Gavriel Dahan, the officer on the spot '... informed the command several times over the radio apparatus in the jeep of the number killed. Opinions differ as to the figure he gave in his reports, but all are agreed that in his first report he said:
... 'one less', and in the next two reports: 'fifteen less' and 'many less - it is difficult to count them'. The last two reports, which followed each other in quick succession, were picked up by Captain Levy, who passed them on to Melinki. When he was informed that there were 'fifteen less' in Kafr Qasem, Melinki gave orders which he was unable to transmit to Dahan before the report arrived of 'many less - it is difficult to count them', for the firing to stop and for a more moderate procedure to be adopted in the whole area... This order finally ended the bloodshed at Qafr Qasem.'
"All this was established in the trial which, as the scandal slowly leaked out, the government was obliged to hold. The trial was a pro forma affair. There was little moral outrage in the courtroom, and, apart from a few lone voices, very little outside it. During the proceedings the leading newspaper Haaretz reported that 'the eleven officers and soldiers who are on trial for the massacre in Kafr Qasem have all received a 50% increase in their salaries. A special messenger was sent to Jerusalem to bring the cheques to the accused in time for Passover. A number of the accused had been given a vacation for the holiday... The accused mingle freely with the spectators; the officers smile at them and pat them on the back; some of them shake hands with them. It is obvious, that these people, whether they will be found innocent or guilty, are not treated as criminals, but as heroes.' One Private David Goldfield reportedly resigned from the Security Police in protest against the trial. According to the Jewish Newsletter, his testimony merely reflected what most Israelis thought: 'I feel that the Arabs are the enemies of our State... When I went to Kafr Qasem, I felt that I went against the enemy and I made no distinction between the Arabs in Israel and those outside its frontiers.' Asked what he would do if he met an Arab woman, in no sense a security threat, who was trying to reach her home, he replied: 'I would shoot her down, I would harbour no sentiments, because I received an order and I had to carry it out.' The sentences were pro forma too. Melinki and Dahan got jail terms of 17 and 15 years respectively, but it was a foregone conclusion that they would only serve a fraction of them. In response to appeals for a pardon, the Supreme Military Court decided to reduce the 'harsh' sentence; and, following this generous example, the Chief of Staff, then the Head of State, and finally a Committee for the Release of Prisoners all made contributions, so that within a year of their sentence Melinki and Dahan were free men. As for Brigadier Shadmi - the 'no sentimentality' senior officer - a Special Military Court found him guilty of a 'merely technical' error, reprimanded him and fined him one piastre. But the twist in the tail was yet to come. Nine months after his release from prison, Dahan, convicted of killing 43 Arabs in an hour, was appointed 'officer responsible for Arab affairs' in the town of Ramleh. And the last that has been heard of Major Melinki was that, through his influential connections in the army, he had secured a coveted permit, sought after by many an entrepreneur, to set up a tourist centre in southern Israel." (The Gun & The Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East, 1977, pp 185-87)
By way of highlighting the obscenity of the judicial farce which followed the massacre (which, incidentally, was covered up for 6 weeks before the troops responsible were charged with murder), it's worth recalling colonial Australia's Myall Creek massacre. Here's the introduction to the Wikipedia entry on it:
'The Myall Creek massacre involved the killing of up to 30 unarmed Indigenous Australians by 10 white Europeans and one black African on 10 June 1838 at Myall Creek near Bingara in northern New South Wales. After two trials, seven of the 11 colonists involved in the killings were found guilty of murder and hanged."
That was 118 years before Kafr Qassem.
"Israeli President Reuven Rivlin has acknowledged past and present wrongdoings to his country's Arabs... Mr Rivlin spoke at a memorial ceremony for victims of the 1956 massacre at Kafr Qassem, where Israeli forces killed 47 residents of the Israeli Arab village for breaking a wartime curfew, becoming the first Israeli president to attend the event. 'A terrible crime was committed here,' he said. 'The brutal killings in Kafr Qassem are an anomalous [?!] and sorrowful chapter in the history of the relations between Arabs and Jews living here... Kafr Qassam is adjacent to the West Bank. In 1956, it was under [Israeli] military rule and, on October 29 - the first day of a war with Egypt - Israeli border policemen gunned down residents who were unaware a curfew had been imposed... The Kafr Qassem massacre is taught in the Israeli education system as a case of an illegal military order that must be refused by soldiers." (Killings were crime against Israeli Arabs, says president, AFP/Sydney Morning Herald, 28/10/14)
Notice how, in the ms media, Israel almost always manages to come up smelling like roses? Funny, that.
By way of contextualising the final sentence in the AFP report, I draw your attention to the following finding by Israeli educationist Nurit Peled-Elhanan:
"The Kaffer Kassem massacre is remembered in Jewish-Israeli consciousness mainly for being the source for the court's unprecedented ruling against compliance with 'manifestly unlawful orders' [but Israeli textbooks] failed to mention that the verdict was not carried out to its term and said nothing about the suffering of the villagers." (Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology & Propaganda in Education, 2012, p 172)
The following account of the massacre and its aftermath by British scholar David Hirst shows why:
"The Arabs remember Kafr Qasem as the Deir Yassin of the established State. Less revealing, perhaps, than the event itself was the reaction it generated. On 29 October 1956, on the eve of Israel's invasion of Egypt, a detachment of Frontier Guards imposed a curfew on villages near the Jordanian frontier. Among them was Kafr Qasem. The Mukhtar was informed of the curfew just half an hour before it was due to go into effect. It was therefore quite impossible for him to pass the message on to the villagers who would be returning, as dusk fell, from their various places of work. Major Shmuel Melinki, the detachment commander, had foreseen this eventuality, and he asked his superior, Brigadier Yshishkhar Shadmi, what should be done about anyone coming home in ignorance of the curfew. The Brigadier had replied: 'I don't want any sentimentality... that's just too bad for him.' And there was no sentimentality. In the first hour of the curfew, between 5 and 6 o'clock, the Frontier Guards killed 47 villagers. They had returned home individually or in batches. A few came on foot, but most travelled by bicycle, mule cart or lorry. They included women and children. But all the Frontier Guards wanted to know was whether they were from Kafr Qasem. For if they were, they shot them down at close range with automatic weapons. 'Of every group of returning workers, some were killed and others wounded; very few succeeded in escaping unhurt. The proportion of those killed increased, until, of the last group, which consisted of 14 women, a boy and 4 men, all were killed, except one girl, who was seriously wounded.' The slaughter might have gone on like this had not Lieutenant Gavriel Dahan, the officer on the spot '... informed the command several times over the radio apparatus in the jeep of the number killed. Opinions differ as to the figure he gave in his reports, but all are agreed that in his first report he said:
... 'one less', and in the next two reports: 'fifteen less' and 'many less - it is difficult to count them'. The last two reports, which followed each other in quick succession, were picked up by Captain Levy, who passed them on to Melinki. When he was informed that there were 'fifteen less' in Kafr Qasem, Melinki gave orders which he was unable to transmit to Dahan before the report arrived of 'many less - it is difficult to count them', for the firing to stop and for a more moderate procedure to be adopted in the whole area... This order finally ended the bloodshed at Qafr Qasem.'
"All this was established in the trial which, as the scandal slowly leaked out, the government was obliged to hold. The trial was a pro forma affair. There was little moral outrage in the courtroom, and, apart from a few lone voices, very little outside it. During the proceedings the leading newspaper Haaretz reported that 'the eleven officers and soldiers who are on trial for the massacre in Kafr Qasem have all received a 50% increase in their salaries. A special messenger was sent to Jerusalem to bring the cheques to the accused in time for Passover. A number of the accused had been given a vacation for the holiday... The accused mingle freely with the spectators; the officers smile at them and pat them on the back; some of them shake hands with them. It is obvious, that these people, whether they will be found innocent or guilty, are not treated as criminals, but as heroes.' One Private David Goldfield reportedly resigned from the Security Police in protest against the trial. According to the Jewish Newsletter, his testimony merely reflected what most Israelis thought: 'I feel that the Arabs are the enemies of our State... When I went to Kafr Qasem, I felt that I went against the enemy and I made no distinction between the Arabs in Israel and those outside its frontiers.' Asked what he would do if he met an Arab woman, in no sense a security threat, who was trying to reach her home, he replied: 'I would shoot her down, I would harbour no sentiments, because I received an order and I had to carry it out.' The sentences were pro forma too. Melinki and Dahan got jail terms of 17 and 15 years respectively, but it was a foregone conclusion that they would only serve a fraction of them. In response to appeals for a pardon, the Supreme Military Court decided to reduce the 'harsh' sentence; and, following this generous example, the Chief of Staff, then the Head of State, and finally a Committee for the Release of Prisoners all made contributions, so that within a year of their sentence Melinki and Dahan were free men. As for Brigadier Shadmi - the 'no sentimentality' senior officer - a Special Military Court found him guilty of a 'merely technical' error, reprimanded him and fined him one piastre. But the twist in the tail was yet to come. Nine months after his release from prison, Dahan, convicted of killing 43 Arabs in an hour, was appointed 'officer responsible for Arab affairs' in the town of Ramleh. And the last that has been heard of Major Melinki was that, through his influential connections in the army, he had secured a coveted permit, sought after by many an entrepreneur, to set up a tourist centre in southern Israel." (The Gun & The Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East, 1977, pp 185-87)
By way of highlighting the obscenity of the judicial farce which followed the massacre (which, incidentally, was covered up for 6 weeks before the troops responsible were charged with murder), it's worth recalling colonial Australia's Myall Creek massacre. Here's the introduction to the Wikipedia entry on it:
'The Myall Creek massacre involved the killing of up to 30 unarmed Indigenous Australians by 10 white Europeans and one black African on 10 June 1838 at Myall Creek near Bingara in northern New South Wales. After two trials, seven of the 11 colonists involved in the killings were found guilty of murder and hanged."
That was 118 years before Kafr Qassem.
Monday, July 2, 2012
Massacre Inc.
"America is about to enter a presidential election year... The candidates will inevitably differ on various domestic issues - health care, abortion, gay marriage, taxes, education, immigration - and spirited debates are certain to erupt on a host of foreign policy questions as well... Yet on one subject, we can be equally confident that the candidates will speak with one voice. In 2008, as in previous election years, serious candidates for the highest office in the land will go to considerable lengths to express their deep personal commitment to one country - Israel - as well as their determination to maintain unyielding US support for the Jewish state."
So begins the introduction to Mearsheimer & Walt's 2007 classic, The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy.
As in the US, so too, unfortunately, in Australia. Here is merely the most recent example:
"The House of Representatives rose in unison on Tuesday in support of a motion calling on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to observe a minute of silence at the London Games for the 11 Israeli victims of the Munich massacre [of 1972]. The move comes less than a month after an open letter from The Australian Jewish News beseeching the IOC to hold a memorial at the 2012 Games attracted a raft of high-profile signatories, including Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott." (Parliament rises for Munich, 29/6/12)
Nothing like a shared ignorance, sycophancy, and crying need for campaign funds to unite Lib and Lab. And nothing like our Israel lobby (and its parliamentary operatives, Paul Fletcher (Lib), Josh Frydenberg (Lib), Mike Kelly (Lab), and Michael Danby (Lab), who moved the above bi-partisan motion) to pull a stunt like this on behalf of a state whose very road to statehood was paved with the massacres of Palestinians and other Arabs, and whose history ever since has been studded with them.
I merely recall the one which followed, within mere days, the Munich massacre:
"When Palestinian terrorists killed 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics of 1972, Syria bore the brunt of Israel's eye-for-eye reprisals. It was, of course, more like 20 eyes for one. For at least 200 people, many of them women and children, and possibly as many as 500, died in simultaneous air attacks on nine separate targets. The Phantoms and Skyhawks swooped on the suburban Damascus resort of al-Hama; the bombs fell indiscriminately on Palestinians in their hillside dwellings and on Syrians, in their cars or strolling by the river Barada on their weekend outing. Survivors recounted how they were machine-gunned as they ran for cover." (The Gun & The Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East, David Hirst, 1977, p 251)
But don't ever expect any of our parliamentary sheep to stand up for these people.
To inject a little perspective here, allow me to adapt the words of Edward John Eyre (written in 1845) about the internecine warfare which arose when European settlers invaded Aboriginal Australia in the 19th century: Could blood answer blood, perhaps for every drop of Israeli's shed by Palestinian natives, a torrent of theirs, by Israeli hands, would crimson the earth. (See my 12/6/08 post Pemulwuy in Palestine.)
So begins the introduction to Mearsheimer & Walt's 2007 classic, The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy.
As in the US, so too, unfortunately, in Australia. Here is merely the most recent example:
"The House of Representatives rose in unison on Tuesday in support of a motion calling on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to observe a minute of silence at the London Games for the 11 Israeli victims of the Munich massacre [of 1972]. The move comes less than a month after an open letter from The Australian Jewish News beseeching the IOC to hold a memorial at the 2012 Games attracted a raft of high-profile signatories, including Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott." (Parliament rises for Munich, 29/6/12)
Nothing like a shared ignorance, sycophancy, and crying need for campaign funds to unite Lib and Lab. And nothing like our Israel lobby (and its parliamentary operatives, Paul Fletcher (Lib), Josh Frydenberg (Lib), Mike Kelly (Lab), and Michael Danby (Lab), who moved the above bi-partisan motion) to pull a stunt like this on behalf of a state whose very road to statehood was paved with the massacres of Palestinians and other Arabs, and whose history ever since has been studded with them.
I merely recall the one which followed, within mere days, the Munich massacre:
"When Palestinian terrorists killed 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics of 1972, Syria bore the brunt of Israel's eye-for-eye reprisals. It was, of course, more like 20 eyes for one. For at least 200 people, many of them women and children, and possibly as many as 500, died in simultaneous air attacks on nine separate targets. The Phantoms and Skyhawks swooped on the suburban Damascus resort of al-Hama; the bombs fell indiscriminately on Palestinians in their hillside dwellings and on Syrians, in their cars or strolling by the river Barada on their weekend outing. Survivors recounted how they were machine-gunned as they ran for cover." (The Gun & The Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East, David Hirst, 1977, p 251)
But don't ever expect any of our parliamentary sheep to stand up for these people.
To inject a little perspective here, allow me to adapt the words of Edward John Eyre (written in 1845) about the internecine warfare which arose when European settlers invaded Aboriginal Australia in the 19th century: Could blood answer blood, perhaps for every drop of Israeli's shed by Palestinian natives, a torrent of theirs, by Israeli hands, would crimson the earth. (See my 12/6/08 post Pemulwuy in Palestine.)
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Har-Zionistas
"The dark soul of the Bible has come alive among the sons of Nahalal and 'Ein Harod." Moshe Sharett
"Meanwhile, in the country as a whole, there developed around Unit 101 [1953-54] the aura of heroic legend. Its centrepiece was the Arab-fighter extraordinary, Meir Har-Zion. Two or three nights a week, for months on end, this young commando took part in reprisal raids, 'laconically killing Arab soldiers, peasants, and townspeople in a kind of fury without hatred'. He would introduce variations into a monotonous routine. Once, he and his comrades crossed the frontier, seized 6 Arabs, killed 5 of them with a knife as the others watched, and left the sixth alive so that he could tell. His private exploits revealed the same natural bent. On leave, and bored, he once made a daredevil foray deep into enemy territory; on his way back to Jerusalem he shot an Arab soldier on the main highway. Later his sister was killed by a bedouin on one of her own sorties into enemy territory. Har-Zion revenged her by killing two bedouins whom he deemed to be connected to her death. Eventually he was critically wounded in action; his life was saved by a battlefield tracheotomy performed with a penknife. His memoirs and numerous press interviews are the story of a man who can describe, with dry relish, what it is like to stab an Arab shepherd in the back - and who recommends that anyone who wishes for the 'marvellous, sublime feeling' of 'knowing that you are a male' should kill with a knife rather than a gun." (The Gun & the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East, David Hirst, 1977, p 183)
"Undercover Israeli intelligence officers appeared on national television Saturday to talk about assassinating Palestinians in a program broadcast on Israel's Channel 10. Oren Beaton presented a photo album of Palestinians he killed during his time as a commander of an undercover Israeli unit operating in the northern West Bank city of Nablus. Beaton explained that he kept photos of his victims. 'This is a photo of a young Palestinian man called Basim Subeih who I killed. This is another young man. I shredded his body, and the photo shows the remnants of his body', he said. The TV program also featured an undercover agent referred to as 'D', who openly admitted killing 'wanted Palestinians'. He complained of suffering from post traumatic stress disorder and said that the state had rejected his demands for compensation. The Channel 10 presenter appealed to the Israeli government to meet the agent's demands. 'Those are the Shin Bet agents we only hear about and never see, and thanks to them we live safely', she said... Agent 'D' said officers would... 'seize the target and wait until the commander arrives to confirm his identity. Then we shoot him'." (Israeli undercover agents boast of killing Palestinians on TV, maannews.net)
"Meanwhile, in the country as a whole, there developed around Unit 101 [1953-54] the aura of heroic legend. Its centrepiece was the Arab-fighter extraordinary, Meir Har-Zion. Two or three nights a week, for months on end, this young commando took part in reprisal raids, 'laconically killing Arab soldiers, peasants, and townspeople in a kind of fury without hatred'. He would introduce variations into a monotonous routine. Once, he and his comrades crossed the frontier, seized 6 Arabs, killed 5 of them with a knife as the others watched, and left the sixth alive so that he could tell. His private exploits revealed the same natural bent. On leave, and bored, he once made a daredevil foray deep into enemy territory; on his way back to Jerusalem he shot an Arab soldier on the main highway. Later his sister was killed by a bedouin on one of her own sorties into enemy territory. Har-Zion revenged her by killing two bedouins whom he deemed to be connected to her death. Eventually he was critically wounded in action; his life was saved by a battlefield tracheotomy performed with a penknife. His memoirs and numerous press interviews are the story of a man who can describe, with dry relish, what it is like to stab an Arab shepherd in the back - and who recommends that anyone who wishes for the 'marvellous, sublime feeling' of 'knowing that you are a male' should kill with a knife rather than a gun." (The Gun & the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East, David Hirst, 1977, p 183)
"Undercover Israeli intelligence officers appeared on national television Saturday to talk about assassinating Palestinians in a program broadcast on Israel's Channel 10. Oren Beaton presented a photo album of Palestinians he killed during his time as a commander of an undercover Israeli unit operating in the northern West Bank city of Nablus. Beaton explained that he kept photos of his victims. 'This is a photo of a young Palestinian man called Basim Subeih who I killed. This is another young man. I shredded his body, and the photo shows the remnants of his body', he said. The TV program also featured an undercover agent referred to as 'D', who openly admitted killing 'wanted Palestinians'. He complained of suffering from post traumatic stress disorder and said that the state had rejected his demands for compensation. The Channel 10 presenter appealed to the Israeli government to meet the agent's demands. 'Those are the Shin Bet agents we only hear about and never see, and thanks to them we live safely', she said... Agent 'D' said officers would... 'seize the target and wait until the commander arrives to confirm his identity. Then we shoot him'." (Israeli undercover agents boast of killing Palestinians on TV, maannews.net)
Friday, December 24, 2010
Ending a 'Diaspora'
"A State of seven hundred, eight hundred thousand Jews cannot be the climax of a vigil kept unbroken through generations and down the patient centuries... No! So empty a State would be little justified, for it would not change the destiny of Jewry, or fulfill our historic covenant. The duty of the State is to end Galut [exile of the Jews] at last. Perhaps our generation will not live to see a homecoming from the New World, or from Russia in the Old World, but, when the war is over and the State made strong, what let or hindrance will deny us early sight of the ending of the Diaspora in Moslem lands of North Africa and the Middle East, and in Western Europe no less!"
David Ben Gurion, 13/8/48 (Cited in his book, Rebirth & Destiny of Israel, 1954, pp 276-277)
Could Nassir Sharhoom be onto something here?: "A new wave of Iraqi Christians has fled to northern Iraq or abroad amid a campaign of violence against them and growing fear that the country's security forces are unable or, more ominously, unwilling to protect them. The flight - involving thousands of residents from Baghdad and Mosul, in particular - followed an October 31 siege at a church in Baghdad that killed 51 worshippers and two priests and a subsequent series of bombings and assassinations singling out Christians... Those who fled the latest violence - many in a panicked rush, with only the possessions they could pack in cars - warned the new violence presages the demise of the faith in Iraq. Several evoked the mass departure of Iraq's Jews after the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. 'It's exactly what happened to the Jews', said Nassir Sharhoom, 47, who fled last month to the Kurdish capital, Erbil, with his family from Dora, a once-mixed neighbourhood in Baghdad. 'They want us all to go'." (Iraqi Christians flee violence, New York Times/ Sydney Morning Herald, 18/12/10)
If Nassir's correct, and what is happening to Iraqi Christians is exactly what happened to Iraqi Jews after 1948, then it's Zionist operatives who are behind this current exodus.
So what exactly happened to Iraqi Jews in the years immediately following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948? The incredible story of the dark force responsible for ending, to use Ben-Gurion's euphemism for 'uprooting', Iraqi Jewry is told by British historian David Hirst in his first-rate history of the Palestine problem, The Gun & the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East (1977). I present it here in abridged form:
"It was the last day of Passover, April 1950. In Baghdad, the Jews had spent it strolling along the banks of the Tigris in celebration of the Sea Song. This was an old custom of the oldest Jewish community in the world; the 130,000 Jews of Iraq attributed their origins to Nebuchadnezzar, the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile. A good 50,000 of them thronged the esplanade. By nine o'clock in the evening the crowds were thinning out. But on Abu Nawwas street young Jewish intellectuals were still gathered in the Dar al-Beida coffee-shop.
"Suddenly, the convivial atmosphere was shattered by an explosion. A small bomb, hurled from a passing car, had gone off on the pavement just outside. By chance no one was hurt. But the incident shook the Jewish community. They were convinced that Iraqi extremists wanted to kill them. The fainter-hearted began to murmur 'it is better to go to Israel'. The next day there was a rush to the offices where Jews wishing to renounce their Iraqi citizenship had to present themselves for registration. Their right to emigrate had been officially acknowledged by the government on the feast of Purim a month before. Its object was to prevent emigration by illegal means... In all, about 10,000 Jews signed up to leave after the bomb; the big Ezra Daud synagogue had to be set aside as a registration office... The panic did not last very long, however, and registration tapered off...
"Then there was another explosion. This time it was at the US Information Centre, where many young Jews used to come and read. Again the theory was that an extremist Iraqi organization had planted the bomb, which only by chance failed to hurt anyone. Once again, therefore, there was a rush on the Ezra Daud synagogue; only this time the panic - and the number of would-be emigrants - was less than before. The year ended, and March 1951, the time-limit set for the renunciation of citizenship, was approaching.
"The third time there were victims. It happened outside the Mas'uda Shemtov synagogue... That day in January the synagogue was full of Kurdish Jews from the northern city of Suleimaniyyah. Outside a Jewish boy was distributing sweetmeats to curious onlookers. When the bomb went off he was killed instantly and a man standing behind him was badly wounded in the eyes.
"And this time there was no longer any doubt in Jews' minds: an anti-Jewish organization was plotting against them. Better to leave Iraq while there was still time. The queues lengthened outside the Ezra Daud synagogue... A few days later the Iraqi parliament passed a law confiscating the property of all Jews who renounced their citizenship... The planes started arriving at a rate of 3 or 4 a day. At first the emigrants were flown to Nicosia accompanied by an Iraqi police officer. But after a while even that make-believe was dropped and they went directly to Israel's Lydda airport - the police officer returning alone in the empty plane. Before long all that was left of the 130,000, abandoning home, property and an ancient heritage, was a mere 5,000 souls.
"It was not long before a bombshell of a different kind hit the pathetic remnants of Iraqi Jewry. They learned that the 3 explosions were the work not of Arab extremists, but of the very people who sought to rescue them; of a clandestine organization called 'The Movement', whose leader, 'commander of the Jewish ghettoes [!] in Iraq', had received this letter from Yigal Allon, chief of the Palmach commandos, and subsequently Foreign Minister of Israel: 'Ramadan my brother... I was very satisfied in learning that you have succeeded in starting a group and that we were able to transfer at least some of the weapons intended for you. It is depressing to think that Jews may once again be slaughtered, our girls raped, that our nation's honour may again be smirched... should disturbances break out, you will be able to enlarge the choice of defenders and co-opt Jews who have as yet not been organized as members of the Underground. But be warned lest you do this prematurely, thereby endangering the security of your units which are, in fact, the only defence against a terrible pogrom'.
"The astonishing truth - that the bombs which terrorized the Jewish community had been Zionist bombs - was revealed when, in the summer of 1950, an elegantly dressed man entered Uruzdi Beg, the largest general store in Baghdad. One of the salesmen, a Palestinian refugee, turned white when he saw him. He left the counter and ran out into the street, where he told two policemen: 'I recognize the face of an Israeli'. He had been a coffee-boy in Acre, and he knew Yehudah Tajjar from there. Arrested, Tajjar confessed that he was indeed an Israeli, but explained that he had come to Baghdad to marry an Iraqi Jewish girl. His revelations led to more arrests, some 15 in all. Shalom Salih, a youngster in charge of Haganah arms caches, broke down during interrogation and took the police from synagogue to synagogue, showing them where the weapons, smuggled in since World War II, were hidden. During the trial, the prosecution charged that the accused were members of the Zionist underground. Their primary aim - to which the throwing of the three bombs had so devastatingly contributed - was to frighten the Jews into emigrating as soon as possible. Two were sentenced to death, the rest to long prison terms.
"It was Tajjar himself who first broke Jewish silence about this affair. Sentenced by the Baghdad court to life imprisonment, he was released after ten years and found his way to Israel. On 29 May 1966 the campaigning weekly magazine Ha'olam Hazeh published an account of the emigration of Iraqi Jews based on Tajjar's testimony. Then on 9 November 1972, the Black Panther, militant voice of Israel's Oriental Jews, published the full story...
"When Ben-Gurion made his impassioned pleas for immigrants to people of the new-born state of Israel, he was addressing European Jews (from both the New and the Old Worlds) in particular. Not only had European jury founded Zionism, it was the main source of that high- quality manpower, armed with the technical skills, the social and cultural attitudes which Israel needed. But with the Holocaust over, the source was tending to dry up. So the Zionists decided that 'Oriental' Jewry must be 'ingathered' as well. It is often forgotten that the safeguard clause of the Balfour Declaration - 'it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the exisiting non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in other countries - was designed to cover Diaspora Jews as well as native Arabs. But the uprooting of a million 'Oriental' Jews showed that, for the Zionists, it was a clause to be ignored in both its parts. Everywhere they applied the same essential techniques, but nowhere perhaps, with such thoroughness as they did in Iraq. 'Cruel Zionism', someone called it." (pp 155-160)
David Ben Gurion, 13/8/48 (Cited in his book, Rebirth & Destiny of Israel, 1954, pp 276-277)
Could Nassir Sharhoom be onto something here?: "A new wave of Iraqi Christians has fled to northern Iraq or abroad amid a campaign of violence against them and growing fear that the country's security forces are unable or, more ominously, unwilling to protect them. The flight - involving thousands of residents from Baghdad and Mosul, in particular - followed an October 31 siege at a church in Baghdad that killed 51 worshippers and two priests and a subsequent series of bombings and assassinations singling out Christians... Those who fled the latest violence - many in a panicked rush, with only the possessions they could pack in cars - warned the new violence presages the demise of the faith in Iraq. Several evoked the mass departure of Iraq's Jews after the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. 'It's exactly what happened to the Jews', said Nassir Sharhoom, 47, who fled last month to the Kurdish capital, Erbil, with his family from Dora, a once-mixed neighbourhood in Baghdad. 'They want us all to go'." (Iraqi Christians flee violence, New York Times/ Sydney Morning Herald, 18/12/10)
If Nassir's correct, and what is happening to Iraqi Christians is exactly what happened to Iraqi Jews after 1948, then it's Zionist operatives who are behind this current exodus.
So what exactly happened to Iraqi Jews in the years immediately following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948? The incredible story of the dark force responsible for ending, to use Ben-Gurion's euphemism for 'uprooting', Iraqi Jewry is told by British historian David Hirst in his first-rate history of the Palestine problem, The Gun & the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East (1977). I present it here in abridged form:
"It was the last day of Passover, April 1950. In Baghdad, the Jews had spent it strolling along the banks of the Tigris in celebration of the Sea Song. This was an old custom of the oldest Jewish community in the world; the 130,000 Jews of Iraq attributed their origins to Nebuchadnezzar, the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile. A good 50,000 of them thronged the esplanade. By nine o'clock in the evening the crowds were thinning out. But on Abu Nawwas street young Jewish intellectuals were still gathered in the Dar al-Beida coffee-shop.
"Suddenly, the convivial atmosphere was shattered by an explosion. A small bomb, hurled from a passing car, had gone off on the pavement just outside. By chance no one was hurt. But the incident shook the Jewish community. They were convinced that Iraqi extremists wanted to kill them. The fainter-hearted began to murmur 'it is better to go to Israel'. The next day there was a rush to the offices where Jews wishing to renounce their Iraqi citizenship had to present themselves for registration. Their right to emigrate had been officially acknowledged by the government on the feast of Purim a month before. Its object was to prevent emigration by illegal means... In all, about 10,000 Jews signed up to leave after the bomb; the big Ezra Daud synagogue had to be set aside as a registration office... The panic did not last very long, however, and registration tapered off...
"Then there was another explosion. This time it was at the US Information Centre, where many young Jews used to come and read. Again the theory was that an extremist Iraqi organization had planted the bomb, which only by chance failed to hurt anyone. Once again, therefore, there was a rush on the Ezra Daud synagogue; only this time the panic - and the number of would-be emigrants - was less than before. The year ended, and March 1951, the time-limit set for the renunciation of citizenship, was approaching.
"The third time there were victims. It happened outside the Mas'uda Shemtov synagogue... That day in January the synagogue was full of Kurdish Jews from the northern city of Suleimaniyyah. Outside a Jewish boy was distributing sweetmeats to curious onlookers. When the bomb went off he was killed instantly and a man standing behind him was badly wounded in the eyes.
"And this time there was no longer any doubt in Jews' minds: an anti-Jewish organization was plotting against them. Better to leave Iraq while there was still time. The queues lengthened outside the Ezra Daud synagogue... A few days later the Iraqi parliament passed a law confiscating the property of all Jews who renounced their citizenship... The planes started arriving at a rate of 3 or 4 a day. At first the emigrants were flown to Nicosia accompanied by an Iraqi police officer. But after a while even that make-believe was dropped and they went directly to Israel's Lydda airport - the police officer returning alone in the empty plane. Before long all that was left of the 130,000, abandoning home, property and an ancient heritage, was a mere 5,000 souls.
"It was not long before a bombshell of a different kind hit the pathetic remnants of Iraqi Jewry. They learned that the 3 explosions were the work not of Arab extremists, but of the very people who sought to rescue them; of a clandestine organization called 'The Movement', whose leader, 'commander of the Jewish ghettoes [!] in Iraq', had received this letter from Yigal Allon, chief of the Palmach commandos, and subsequently Foreign Minister of Israel: 'Ramadan my brother... I was very satisfied in learning that you have succeeded in starting a group and that we were able to transfer at least some of the weapons intended for you. It is depressing to think that Jews may once again be slaughtered, our girls raped, that our nation's honour may again be smirched... should disturbances break out, you will be able to enlarge the choice of defenders and co-opt Jews who have as yet not been organized as members of the Underground. But be warned lest you do this prematurely, thereby endangering the security of your units which are, in fact, the only defence against a terrible pogrom'.
"The astonishing truth - that the bombs which terrorized the Jewish community had been Zionist bombs - was revealed when, in the summer of 1950, an elegantly dressed man entered Uruzdi Beg, the largest general store in Baghdad. One of the salesmen, a Palestinian refugee, turned white when he saw him. He left the counter and ran out into the street, where he told two policemen: 'I recognize the face of an Israeli'. He had been a coffee-boy in Acre, and he knew Yehudah Tajjar from there. Arrested, Tajjar confessed that he was indeed an Israeli, but explained that he had come to Baghdad to marry an Iraqi Jewish girl. His revelations led to more arrests, some 15 in all. Shalom Salih, a youngster in charge of Haganah arms caches, broke down during interrogation and took the police from synagogue to synagogue, showing them where the weapons, smuggled in since World War II, were hidden. During the trial, the prosecution charged that the accused were members of the Zionist underground. Their primary aim - to which the throwing of the three bombs had so devastatingly contributed - was to frighten the Jews into emigrating as soon as possible. Two were sentenced to death, the rest to long prison terms.
"It was Tajjar himself who first broke Jewish silence about this affair. Sentenced by the Baghdad court to life imprisonment, he was released after ten years and found his way to Israel. On 29 May 1966 the campaigning weekly magazine Ha'olam Hazeh published an account of the emigration of Iraqi Jews based on Tajjar's testimony. Then on 9 November 1972, the Black Panther, militant voice of Israel's Oriental Jews, published the full story...
"When Ben-Gurion made his impassioned pleas for immigrants to people of the new-born state of Israel, he was addressing European Jews (from both the New and the Old Worlds) in particular. Not only had European jury founded Zionism, it was the main source of that high- quality manpower, armed with the technical skills, the social and cultural attitudes which Israel needed. But with the Holocaust over, the source was tending to dry up. So the Zionists decided that 'Oriental' Jewry must be 'ingathered' as well. It is often forgotten that the safeguard clause of the Balfour Declaration - 'it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the exisiting non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in other countries - was designed to cover Diaspora Jews as well as native Arabs. But the uprooting of a million 'Oriental' Jews showed that, for the Zionists, it was a clause to be ignored in both its parts. Everywhere they applied the same essential techniques, but nowhere perhaps, with such thoroughness as they did in Iraq. 'Cruel Zionism', someone called it." (pp 155-160)
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time...
To adapt the words of the late, immortal George Carlin, I don't just have pet peeves when it comes to politicians, I have major psychotic hatreds. One - just one - relates to Arthur James Balfour (1848-1930), the Lord Balfour of the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917.
As David Hirst in his invaluable history of the Arab-Israeli conflict points out: "The Balfour Declaration was one of the two key documents that have shaped the modern history of the Middle East. The other was the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. This secret deal was part of an understanding in which the 3 major allies, Britain, France and Czarist Russia, defined each other's interests in the post-war Middle East. Sir Mark Sykes, Secretary to the British Cabinet, and the French plenipotentiary, M Georges Picot, agreed that, after the break-up of the Ottoman empire, Britain and France would divide its former Arab provinces between them... France was to take over Lebanon and Syria, Britain would get Iraq and Transjordan. Palestine was to be placed under an 'international administration' of a kind to be decided on later." (The Gun & the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East, 1977, pp 37)
I'll be returning to Sykes later in this post, but, as Hirst relates, "The Balfour Declation grew out of Sykes-Picot, but, in retrospect, its importance far outweighs it. Indeed, it is difficult to recall a document which has so arbitrarily changed the course of history as this one. The Arab-Israeli struggle is the likeliest of contemporary world problems to precipitate the nuclear doomsday; if it does, surviving historians will surely record that it all began with with the brief and seemingly innocuous letter... which Arthur Balfour, the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, addressed to Lord Rothschild on 2 November 1917." (ibid pp 37-38)
You will, of course, be familiar with the second paragraph: "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 this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."
In retrospect a colonialist cock-up of the first order, you may, like myself, have wondered from time to time if, in retrospect, Balfour had ever had any regrets over the document that bore his name. Unfortunately, it would appear that he didn't: In 1925 he set sail to inaugurate the new Hebrew University in Palestine. Embarking first at the Egyptian port city of Alexandria, he made his way to Cairo. There he was spared a protest staged by Palestinian Arabs living in Egypt, when the Interior Minister, Isma'il Sidqi, had the protesters arrested - surely proof positive, in light of the reception given by the Mubarak regime to the recent Gaza Freedom March and Viva Palestina aid convoy, that some things never really change in the Land of the Pharoahs. (See Palestine & Modern Arab Poetry, Khalid A Sulaiman, 1984, p 51)
From Cairo, Balfour travelled on to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Balfour biographer R J Q Adams takes up the story: "There was much pausing at kibbutzim and townships where Jewish settlers wished to cheer the man they identified as their benefactor, and Balfour smilingly endured the unwonted part of popular hero. The highlight of the visit was the formal inauguration on 1 April of the new university, and, before an assembly of ten thousand gathered at the foot of Mount Scopus, Balfour did the honours garbed in the gown of the chancellor of Cambridge University. Like Weizmann, he found the long speeches trying - most were in Hebrew, a language of which he knew nothing - but he endured them, and the ceremony concluded to tumultuous applause. Fatigued by the extended ceremonies, he was pleased to spend a few days as the guest of Lord Samuel, since 1920 the high commissioner in Jerusalem. He revived quickly, and was soon enjoying tennis with his host on the clay courts of the residency. The British authorities and the Jewish defence force, the Haganah, provided security for the official party, but Balfour wished to continue on to view the historic sights of Syria, where the protection of the visitors became the responsibility of the French administration, already anxious over a recent insurrection. Their plans soon went awry as in Damascus a hostile Arab crowd - infuriated by the presence of the author of the hated 1917 Declaration - advanced on his hotel, only to be received by French cavalry who fired volleys of warning shots. General Sarrail, the military governor, was anxious to bundle the party out of his city, and Balfour and his friends were packed off to Beirut and kept on board ship for three days before their vessel was allowed to sail. Though Balfour brushed aside his adventure, insisting he had faced worse times in Ireland, later he would speak only of the Palestinian days of his adventure. Certainly it in no way shook his confidence in the rightness of the famous Declaration, and he steadfastly discounted any signs of religious and racial strife in Palestine, writing in 1927, 'Nothing has occurred during that period to suggest the least doubt as to the wisdom of this new departure'." (Balfour: The Last Grandee, 2007, pp 368-369)
Sir Mark Sykes (1879-1919), he of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, was apparently a different man entirely:
"Sir Mark Sykes had returned to Paris early in February [1919] from a tour of over two months in Palestine and Syria, and had brought disquieting news. What he had observed on that journey had opened his eyes to realities that had hitherto escaped him. He had been particularly affected by his own discovery of the gap between what he had previously understood Zionism to be and what he had just seen of Zionism in the making in Palestine and of its effects on the minds of the Arabs. '... From being the evangelist of Zionism during the War he had returned to Paris with feelings shocked by the intense bitterness which had been provoked in the Holy Land. Matters had reached a stage beyond his conception of what Zionism would be. His last journey to Palestine had raised many doubts, which were not set at rest by a visit to Rome. To Cardinal Gasquet he admitted the change of his views on Zionism, and that he was determined to qualify, guide and, if possible, save the dangerous situation which was rapidly arising'. Syke's views about the Sykes-Picot Agreement had undergone a similar revulsion: he had become convinced of its inadaptability to actual conditions and of the futility of trying to execute it. And, although he was feeling worn out with the exertions of his tour, he had hurried back to Paris bent upon doing all he could to correct false hopes and put a brake upon ambitions which now seemed to him insensate. But within a few days of his return he fell ill and died: and it is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that, for Jews, Arabs and British alike, to say nothing of the French, his death at that juncture was little short of a calamity. Without going so far as to suppose that one individual, however genuine, talented and forceful, could have infected the Versailles peacemakers with his own sense of justice, there is little doubt that, had he lived, his recital of facts and his forecast of consequences might have filled the minds of the politicians with those anxieties which are often, in politics, the beginning of wisdom. In those few days of activity before his fatal illness, Sykes had seen Lord George, Balfour and several of his French and Zionist friends, and had begun the campaign for a return to sanity upon which he had set his heart. What effect his warnings may have had at the time is not known. But when, a few weeks after Sykes' death, [Emir] Faisal's proposal for an inquiry [to visit Syria and Palestine and ascertain the wishes of the population*] on the spot began to be seriously considered, the prevalent sentiment in British, French and Zionist political circles was one of still greater discomfort. And Balfour went to the lengths of addressing a memorandum to his chief, in which he urged that Palestine be altogether excluded from the purpose of the inquiry, while Clemenceau kept insisting that France could not consent to its being held unless it were to cover Iraq and Palestine and well was Syria." (The Arab Awakening, George Antonius, 1938, pp 290-292)
[*This became the King-Crane Commission with regard to Syria-Palestine & Iraq, 28/8/1919. See my 18/6/08 post Avnery's Apology: A Critique]
To draw on Carlin again, it looks like the wrong man got pencilled in for a sudden visit from the Angel of Death.
As David Hirst in his invaluable history of the Arab-Israeli conflict points out: "The Balfour Declaration was one of the two key documents that have shaped the modern history of the Middle East. The other was the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. This secret deal was part of an understanding in which the 3 major allies, Britain, France and Czarist Russia, defined each other's interests in the post-war Middle East. Sir Mark Sykes, Secretary to the British Cabinet, and the French plenipotentiary, M Georges Picot, agreed that, after the break-up of the Ottoman empire, Britain and France would divide its former Arab provinces between them... France was to take over Lebanon and Syria, Britain would get Iraq and Transjordan. Palestine was to be placed under an 'international administration' of a kind to be decided on later." (The Gun & the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East, 1977, pp 37)
I'll be returning to Sykes later in this post, but, as Hirst relates, "The Balfour Declation grew out of Sykes-Picot, but, in retrospect, its importance far outweighs it. Indeed, it is difficult to recall a document which has so arbitrarily changed the course of history as this one. The Arab-Israeli struggle is the likeliest of contemporary world problems to precipitate the nuclear doomsday; if it does, surviving historians will surely record that it all began with with the brief and seemingly innocuous letter... which Arthur Balfour, the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, addressed to Lord Rothschild on 2 November 1917." (ibid pp 37-38)
You will, of course, be familiar with the second paragraph: "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 this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."
In retrospect a colonialist cock-up of the first order, you may, like myself, have wondered from time to time if, in retrospect, Balfour had ever had any regrets over the document that bore his name. Unfortunately, it would appear that he didn't: In 1925 he set sail to inaugurate the new Hebrew University in Palestine. Embarking first at the Egyptian port city of Alexandria, he made his way to Cairo. There he was spared a protest staged by Palestinian Arabs living in Egypt, when the Interior Minister, Isma'il Sidqi, had the protesters arrested - surely proof positive, in light of the reception given by the Mubarak regime to the recent Gaza Freedom March and Viva Palestina aid convoy, that some things never really change in the Land of the Pharoahs. (See Palestine & Modern Arab Poetry, Khalid A Sulaiman, 1984, p 51)
From Cairo, Balfour travelled on to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Balfour biographer R J Q Adams takes up the story: "There was much pausing at kibbutzim and townships where Jewish settlers wished to cheer the man they identified as their benefactor, and Balfour smilingly endured the unwonted part of popular hero. The highlight of the visit was the formal inauguration on 1 April of the new university, and, before an assembly of ten thousand gathered at the foot of Mount Scopus, Balfour did the honours garbed in the gown of the chancellor of Cambridge University. Like Weizmann, he found the long speeches trying - most were in Hebrew, a language of which he knew nothing - but he endured them, and the ceremony concluded to tumultuous applause. Fatigued by the extended ceremonies, he was pleased to spend a few days as the guest of Lord Samuel, since 1920 the high commissioner in Jerusalem. He revived quickly, and was soon enjoying tennis with his host on the clay courts of the residency. The British authorities and the Jewish defence force, the Haganah, provided security for the official party, but Balfour wished to continue on to view the historic sights of Syria, where the protection of the visitors became the responsibility of the French administration, already anxious over a recent insurrection. Their plans soon went awry as in Damascus a hostile Arab crowd - infuriated by the presence of the author of the hated 1917 Declaration - advanced on his hotel, only to be received by French cavalry who fired volleys of warning shots. General Sarrail, the military governor, was anxious to bundle the party out of his city, and Balfour and his friends were packed off to Beirut and kept on board ship for three days before their vessel was allowed to sail. Though Balfour brushed aside his adventure, insisting he had faced worse times in Ireland, later he would speak only of the Palestinian days of his adventure. Certainly it in no way shook his confidence in the rightness of the famous Declaration, and he steadfastly discounted any signs of religious and racial strife in Palestine, writing in 1927, 'Nothing has occurred during that period to suggest the least doubt as to the wisdom of this new departure'." (Balfour: The Last Grandee, 2007, pp 368-369)
Sir Mark Sykes (1879-1919), he of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, was apparently a different man entirely:
"Sir Mark Sykes had returned to Paris early in February [1919] from a tour of over two months in Palestine and Syria, and had brought disquieting news. What he had observed on that journey had opened his eyes to realities that had hitherto escaped him. He had been particularly affected by his own discovery of the gap between what he had previously understood Zionism to be and what he had just seen of Zionism in the making in Palestine and of its effects on the minds of the Arabs. '... From being the evangelist of Zionism during the War he had returned to Paris with feelings shocked by the intense bitterness which had been provoked in the Holy Land. Matters had reached a stage beyond his conception of what Zionism would be. His last journey to Palestine had raised many doubts, which were not set at rest by a visit to Rome. To Cardinal Gasquet he admitted the change of his views on Zionism, and that he was determined to qualify, guide and, if possible, save the dangerous situation which was rapidly arising'. Syke's views about the Sykes-Picot Agreement had undergone a similar revulsion: he had become convinced of its inadaptability to actual conditions and of the futility of trying to execute it. And, although he was feeling worn out with the exertions of his tour, he had hurried back to Paris bent upon doing all he could to correct false hopes and put a brake upon ambitions which now seemed to him insensate. But within a few days of his return he fell ill and died: and it is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that, for Jews, Arabs and British alike, to say nothing of the French, his death at that juncture was little short of a calamity. Without going so far as to suppose that one individual, however genuine, talented and forceful, could have infected the Versailles peacemakers with his own sense of justice, there is little doubt that, had he lived, his recital of facts and his forecast of consequences might have filled the minds of the politicians with those anxieties which are often, in politics, the beginning of wisdom. In those few days of activity before his fatal illness, Sykes had seen Lord George, Balfour and several of his French and Zionist friends, and had begun the campaign for a return to sanity upon which he had set his heart. What effect his warnings may have had at the time is not known. But when, a few weeks after Sykes' death, [Emir] Faisal's proposal for an inquiry [to visit Syria and Palestine and ascertain the wishes of the population*] on the spot began to be seriously considered, the prevalent sentiment in British, French and Zionist political circles was one of still greater discomfort. And Balfour went to the lengths of addressing a memorandum to his chief, in which he urged that Palestine be altogether excluded from the purpose of the inquiry, while Clemenceau kept insisting that France could not consent to its being held unless it were to cover Iraq and Palestine and well was Syria." (The Arab Awakening, George Antonius, 1938, pp 290-292)
[*This became the King-Crane Commission with regard to Syria-Palestine & Iraq, 28/8/1919. See my 18/6/08 post Avnery's Apology: A Critique]
To draw on Carlin again, it looks like the wrong man got pencilled in for a sudden visit from the Angel of Death.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Fabricating Dr George Habash
The founder and former leader of the leftist Palestinian resistance organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Dr George Habash, died of a heart attack in Jordan on January 26 at the age of 82.
Not surprisingly, he got very short shrift in The Australian: Notorious Palestine 'defender' dies at 81 (28/1/08). But things weren't much better over at Fairfax either. When The Sydney Morning Herald decided to run The New York Times obituary (27/1/08) on him, whoever pared it down left out the vital contextualising paragraphs of the original. The header, Dead at 82: Palestinian marxist who took terrorism to the sky (28/1/08) said it all.
On the cutting room floor lay the following paragraphs, the 'why' of Dr Habash, without which the reader can be forgiven for thinking that he was simply off on some mad, aerial frolic:
"A number of accounts say Mr Habash was born in Lydda, Palestine, which is now Lod, Israel. The son of a...[Greek Orthodox] grain merchant, he was known as a hard-working and serious student...He studied medicine at the American University in Beirut, but his studies were interrupted in 1948 when he left...to help his family flee Palestine as violence deepened between Arabs and Jews. That experience of the nascent Israeli army driving the Palestinians from their homes had a profound effect on the young medical student, who began organizing Palestinians as soon as he returned to medical school..."
To understand George Habash and his people one must understand 1948 - but of course that is a temporal bridge too far for our native ms media hacks. The NYT's pale reference to 1948 notwithstanding, its obituary is still woefully inadequate, and one wonders why it is that we recycle so much American media hackery.
An infinitely more erudite, informative and objective assessment of the man, by veteran British Middle East correspondent and author, David Hirst, appeared on the website of The Guardian (27/1/08):
"In his later years, George Habash...was often known as 'the conscience of the Palestine revolution'. He had been one of the very earliest founding fathers of that movement, which pioneered armed struggle and revolutionary violence as the sole means of liberating Palestine. Since it first emerged, in the 1960s as a potent new force on the Middle East stage, the movement suffered all manner of vicissitudes, and its ambitions were eventually reduced, almost out of recognition, to an endless series of surrenders to the exigencies of Pax Americana. But, out of sincerity, rather than the opportunism which has tainted other, lesser radicals of his kind, 'Al Hakim' (the doctor or wise man) remained faithful to his original conviction that by force - and force alone - could the Palestinians recover their rights."
After charting Habash's career through to the expulsion of the Palestinian resistance movement from Jordan in 1971, Hirst concludes:
"Moving to Beirut, along with the rest of the PLO, Habash persisted in some of the more spectacular, publicity-seeking acts of violence - with the 1972 massacre of tourists at Lod (once Lydda and now Ben Gurion) Airport by Japanese Red Army terrorists as perhaps the most successful, if ignoble, of them - but to less and less affect. The whole guerilla movement was moving away from random terrorism of that kind, and, at the same time, looking more and more to diplomacy, first as a supplement to, then as a substitute for, military action. Habash, the radical, made it his business to resist every new stage of this growing moderation. But when, at the Palestine National Council (PNC) meeting in 1988, Arafat made his historic offer of a two-state solution to the Palestine problem, Habash did not walk out of the PLO altogether. Nor did he, 3 years later, when the PNC agreed to go to the 1991 Middle East peace conference in Madrid. He said he would respect the will of the majority, however fiercely he opposed it. That loyalty to Palestinian national unity, along with his personal modesty and simplicity, made him perhaps the most liked of the small, still surviving band of the revolution's original chiefs. He stood down as PFLP leader in 2000, 4 years before the death of Yasser Arafat, and 6 years before the Islamicists of Hamas won their victory in the Palestinian election. Pax Americana meanwhile continues to make paltry progress in its regional diplomacy, and many of those who now so grudgingly support it may well in due course conclude that the 'conscience of the revolution' had always been right in opposing it - and the whole concept of Palestinian moderation."
Now there's food for thought!
I can't help but wonder if this staunchly secular, Christian Palestinian revolutionary ever became aware in his later years of his makeover as a forerunner of Osama Bin Laden at the hands of the late, deranged Italian Islamophobe and 'journalist', Oriana Fallaci. Did he, I wonder, ever remember the interview she conducted with him back in 1970 in Amman, or read it in the now defunct Life magazine, under the heading: A leader of the fedayeen: 'We want a war like the Vietnam war'? (The opening sentence reads: "The man I was facing was responsible for most of the acts of terror the Arabs have committed in Europe.")
Certainly, Islamofabulist Fallaci did - sort of. According to the account in her 2004 book-length rant, The Force of Reason, she interviewed him in Jordan in 1972, "while a conscientious bodyguard protected him by pointing his sub-machine gun at my head. Habash explained to me that the Arabs' enemy was not Israel alone: it was the whole West. Among the targets to hit he cited in fact Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland...'Our revolution is part of the world revolution. It is not confined to the reconquest of Palestine...The time has come to admit that we want a war like the war in Vietnam. That we want another Vietnam, and not only for Palestine but for all the Arab countries'...The Palestine problem is not an aside problem. A problem separated from the Arab Nation's realities. Palestinians are part of the Arab Nation. Therefore the entire Arab Nation must go to war against Europe and America. It must unleash a war against the West. And it will. America and Europe don't know that we Arabs are just at the beginning of the beginning. That the best has yet to come. That from now on there will be no peace for the West...To advance step by step. Millimetre by millimetre. Year after year. Decade after decade. Determined, stubborn, patient. This is our strategy. A strategy that we shall expand throughout the whole planet'."
She claims that at the time, she did not grasp the full import of his words, but now realises that he "also meant the cultural war, the demographic war, the religious war waged by stealing a country [Europe!] from its citizens...In short, the war waged through immigration, fertility, presumed pluriculturalism...The Islamic holidays, the 5 prayers' interruptions, the halal meat, the face covered also on the identity papers...The Islamic marriage, the polygamy, the stoning of women..." (pp 131-133)
Before the century is out, Fallaci frets, the Mediterranean Sea could become an Islamic lake, as an Islamized Europe to the north joins the Islamic world to the south to form the jihadist global Islamic umma.
There's only one problem - Habash said nothing of the kind, and the text of Fallaci's 1970 Life interview with him gives her lunacy the lie. To begin with, the interview took place in 1970, not 1972, the Palestinian resistance having been purged from Jordan by July 1971. Then there's the nonsense about the gun.
In the introduction to the 1970 interview she had written, "We met at night in the suburbs of Amman, in a building attached to a refugee camp. The room contained one desk and a few chairs; outside the closed doors, armed fedayeen stood guard. Inside there were only 4 of us: Habash, myself, a photographer and the man who had driven us there."
As for the words she alleges he uttered in The Force of Reason, Habash is quoted in the Life interview as saying that, "Our enemy is Israel, plus the Zionist movement that controls many of the countries which support Israel, plus imperialism. I mean specifically British imperialism from 1918, and American imperialism from 1948 on. If we had to face Israel alone, the problem would have been almost a simple one: but we have to stand against whoever supports Israel economically, militarily, politically, ideologically. This means the capitalist countries that have conceived Israel and are now using it as a bulwark to protect their interests in Arabia. They include the US, and almost every country in Europe."
In response to her question, "How far are you planning to go? Do you want to make war on three-fourths of the planet?", Habash replies: "What we want is a war like the war in Vietnam...not just in Palestine, but throughout the Arab world. Palestinians are part of the Arab nation, and what we need is for the whole Arab nation to enter the war; which will occur anyway, within 3 or 4 years [Habash's timing was prophetically correct: 3 years later in October, 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a war to reclaim occupied territory in the Sinai and the Golan Heights]. By then, if not before, the revolutionary forces in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon will rise to our side in a total war. Our struggle has barely begun, the worst is yet to come. And it is right for Europe and America to be warned now that there will be no peace for them until there is justice for Palestine."
Habash went on to reassure Ignorantissima (as the Italian newspaper, La Republica, called her) that "we will do our best not to harm Europeans," and stressed that "The goal of our struggle is not only that of restoring the nationhood of Palestine, but to transform it into a socialist state as well."
In explaining the essence of guerilla warfare to her, Habash is quoted as saying: "The main point is to select targets where success is 100% assured. To harrass, to upset, to work on the nerves through unexpected small damages. Brute force is out; this is a thinking man's game. Especially when one is as poor as the Popular Front is. It would be silly for us to even think of waging a regular war; imperialism is too powerful and Israel is too strong. The only way to destroy them is to give a little blow here, a little blow there; to advance step by step, inch by inch, for years, for decades, with determination, doggedness, patience."
It is clear throughout that Habash's models are China, Cuba and Vietnam, that his strategy, as Che Guevara had enjoined, is "To make two, three, many Vietnams," and that his primary focus is the liberation of Palestine. Fallaci's 2004 revision of her 1970 interview with him, to fit her twisted and paranoid Islamophobic fantasies, is nothing less than grotesque.
Fallaci's 1970 interview also makes clear just what it was that launched Habash on his revolutionary career - the Lydda death march of 1948, one of the many war crimes that make up the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) about which our ms media are supremely ignorant. Even here, however, Fallaci can't get her dates right, substituting 1967 for 1948. Habash is speaking: "Then it was 1967 [sic: 1948] and they [the Israelis] came to Lydda and...I don't know how to explain this...what this still means for us not to have a home, not to have a nation, or anyone who cares...They forced us to flee. It is a picture that haunts me and that I'll never forget. Thirty thousand human beings walking, weeping... screaming in terror...women with babies in their arms and children tugging at their skirts...and the Israeli soldiers pushing them on with their guns. Some people fell by the wayside, some never got up again. It was terrible. One thinks: this isn't life, this isn't human. Once you have seen this, your heart and your brain are transformed."
Unfortunately, thanks to the recycling ad nauseam of Fallaci's febrile fantasies on innumerable crank websites, it is the fabricated Habash, rather than the real, that most people will be exposed to.
Not surprisingly, he got very short shrift in The Australian: Notorious Palestine 'defender' dies at 81 (28/1/08). But things weren't much better over at Fairfax either. When The Sydney Morning Herald decided to run The New York Times obituary (27/1/08) on him, whoever pared it down left out the vital contextualising paragraphs of the original. The header, Dead at 82: Palestinian marxist who took terrorism to the sky (28/1/08) said it all.
On the cutting room floor lay the following paragraphs, the 'why' of Dr Habash, without which the reader can be forgiven for thinking that he was simply off on some mad, aerial frolic:
"A number of accounts say Mr Habash was born in Lydda, Palestine, which is now Lod, Israel. The son of a...[Greek Orthodox] grain merchant, he was known as a hard-working and serious student...He studied medicine at the American University in Beirut, but his studies were interrupted in 1948 when he left...to help his family flee Palestine as violence deepened between Arabs and Jews. That experience of the nascent Israeli army driving the Palestinians from their homes had a profound effect on the young medical student, who began organizing Palestinians as soon as he returned to medical school..."
To understand George Habash and his people one must understand 1948 - but of course that is a temporal bridge too far for our native ms media hacks. The NYT's pale reference to 1948 notwithstanding, its obituary is still woefully inadequate, and one wonders why it is that we recycle so much American media hackery.
An infinitely more erudite, informative and objective assessment of the man, by veteran British Middle East correspondent and author, David Hirst, appeared on the website of The Guardian (27/1/08):
"In his later years, George Habash...was often known as 'the conscience of the Palestine revolution'. He had been one of the very earliest founding fathers of that movement, which pioneered armed struggle and revolutionary violence as the sole means of liberating Palestine. Since it first emerged, in the 1960s as a potent new force on the Middle East stage, the movement suffered all manner of vicissitudes, and its ambitions were eventually reduced, almost out of recognition, to an endless series of surrenders to the exigencies of Pax Americana. But, out of sincerity, rather than the opportunism which has tainted other, lesser radicals of his kind, 'Al Hakim' (the doctor or wise man) remained faithful to his original conviction that by force - and force alone - could the Palestinians recover their rights."
After charting Habash's career through to the expulsion of the Palestinian resistance movement from Jordan in 1971, Hirst concludes:
"Moving to Beirut, along with the rest of the PLO, Habash persisted in some of the more spectacular, publicity-seeking acts of violence - with the 1972 massacre of tourists at Lod (once Lydda and now Ben Gurion) Airport by Japanese Red Army terrorists as perhaps the most successful, if ignoble, of them - but to less and less affect. The whole guerilla movement was moving away from random terrorism of that kind, and, at the same time, looking more and more to diplomacy, first as a supplement to, then as a substitute for, military action. Habash, the radical, made it his business to resist every new stage of this growing moderation. But when, at the Palestine National Council (PNC) meeting in 1988, Arafat made his historic offer of a two-state solution to the Palestine problem, Habash did not walk out of the PLO altogether. Nor did he, 3 years later, when the PNC agreed to go to the 1991 Middle East peace conference in Madrid. He said he would respect the will of the majority, however fiercely he opposed it. That loyalty to Palestinian national unity, along with his personal modesty and simplicity, made him perhaps the most liked of the small, still surviving band of the revolution's original chiefs. He stood down as PFLP leader in 2000, 4 years before the death of Yasser Arafat, and 6 years before the Islamicists of Hamas won their victory in the Palestinian election. Pax Americana meanwhile continues to make paltry progress in its regional diplomacy, and many of those who now so grudgingly support it may well in due course conclude that the 'conscience of the revolution' had always been right in opposing it - and the whole concept of Palestinian moderation."
Now there's food for thought!
I can't help but wonder if this staunchly secular, Christian Palestinian revolutionary ever became aware in his later years of his makeover as a forerunner of Osama Bin Laden at the hands of the late, deranged Italian Islamophobe and 'journalist', Oriana Fallaci. Did he, I wonder, ever remember the interview she conducted with him back in 1970 in Amman, or read it in the now defunct Life magazine, under the heading: A leader of the fedayeen: 'We want a war like the Vietnam war'? (The opening sentence reads: "The man I was facing was responsible for most of the acts of terror the Arabs have committed in Europe.")
Certainly, Islamofabulist Fallaci did - sort of. According to the account in her 2004 book-length rant, The Force of Reason, she interviewed him in Jordan in 1972, "while a conscientious bodyguard protected him by pointing his sub-machine gun at my head. Habash explained to me that the Arabs' enemy was not Israel alone: it was the whole West. Among the targets to hit he cited in fact Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland...'Our revolution is part of the world revolution. It is not confined to the reconquest of Palestine...The time has come to admit that we want a war like the war in Vietnam. That we want another Vietnam, and not only for Palestine but for all the Arab countries'...The Palestine problem is not an aside problem. A problem separated from the Arab Nation's realities. Palestinians are part of the Arab Nation. Therefore the entire Arab Nation must go to war against Europe and America. It must unleash a war against the West. And it will. America and Europe don't know that we Arabs are just at the beginning of the beginning. That the best has yet to come. That from now on there will be no peace for the West...To advance step by step. Millimetre by millimetre. Year after year. Decade after decade. Determined, stubborn, patient. This is our strategy. A strategy that we shall expand throughout the whole planet'."
She claims that at the time, she did not grasp the full import of his words, but now realises that he "also meant the cultural war, the demographic war, the religious war waged by stealing a country [Europe!] from its citizens...In short, the war waged through immigration, fertility, presumed pluriculturalism...The Islamic holidays, the 5 prayers' interruptions, the halal meat, the face covered also on the identity papers...The Islamic marriage, the polygamy, the stoning of women..." (pp 131-133)
Before the century is out, Fallaci frets, the Mediterranean Sea could become an Islamic lake, as an Islamized Europe to the north joins the Islamic world to the south to form the jihadist global Islamic umma.
There's only one problem - Habash said nothing of the kind, and the text of Fallaci's 1970 Life interview with him gives her lunacy the lie. To begin with, the interview took place in 1970, not 1972, the Palestinian resistance having been purged from Jordan by July 1971. Then there's the nonsense about the gun.
In the introduction to the 1970 interview she had written, "We met at night in the suburbs of Amman, in a building attached to a refugee camp. The room contained one desk and a few chairs; outside the closed doors, armed fedayeen stood guard. Inside there were only 4 of us: Habash, myself, a photographer and the man who had driven us there."
As for the words she alleges he uttered in The Force of Reason, Habash is quoted in the Life interview as saying that, "Our enemy is Israel, plus the Zionist movement that controls many of the countries which support Israel, plus imperialism. I mean specifically British imperialism from 1918, and American imperialism from 1948 on. If we had to face Israel alone, the problem would have been almost a simple one: but we have to stand against whoever supports Israel economically, militarily, politically, ideologically. This means the capitalist countries that have conceived Israel and are now using it as a bulwark to protect their interests in Arabia. They include the US, and almost every country in Europe."
In response to her question, "How far are you planning to go? Do you want to make war on three-fourths of the planet?", Habash replies: "What we want is a war like the war in Vietnam...not just in Palestine, but throughout the Arab world. Palestinians are part of the Arab nation, and what we need is for the whole Arab nation to enter the war; which will occur anyway, within 3 or 4 years [Habash's timing was prophetically correct: 3 years later in October, 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a war to reclaim occupied territory in the Sinai and the Golan Heights]. By then, if not before, the revolutionary forces in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon will rise to our side in a total war. Our struggle has barely begun, the worst is yet to come. And it is right for Europe and America to be warned now that there will be no peace for them until there is justice for Palestine."
Habash went on to reassure Ignorantissima (as the Italian newspaper, La Republica, called her) that "we will do our best not to harm Europeans," and stressed that "The goal of our struggle is not only that of restoring the nationhood of Palestine, but to transform it into a socialist state as well."
In explaining the essence of guerilla warfare to her, Habash is quoted as saying: "The main point is to select targets where success is 100% assured. To harrass, to upset, to work on the nerves through unexpected small damages. Brute force is out; this is a thinking man's game. Especially when one is as poor as the Popular Front is. It would be silly for us to even think of waging a regular war; imperialism is too powerful and Israel is too strong. The only way to destroy them is to give a little blow here, a little blow there; to advance step by step, inch by inch, for years, for decades, with determination, doggedness, patience."
It is clear throughout that Habash's models are China, Cuba and Vietnam, that his strategy, as Che Guevara had enjoined, is "To make two, three, many Vietnams," and that his primary focus is the liberation of Palestine. Fallaci's 2004 revision of her 1970 interview with him, to fit her twisted and paranoid Islamophobic fantasies, is nothing less than grotesque.
Fallaci's 1970 interview also makes clear just what it was that launched Habash on his revolutionary career - the Lydda death march of 1948, one of the many war crimes that make up the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) about which our ms media are supremely ignorant. Even here, however, Fallaci can't get her dates right, substituting 1967 for 1948. Habash is speaking: "Then it was 1967 [sic: 1948] and they [the Israelis] came to Lydda and...I don't know how to explain this...what this still means for us not to have a home, not to have a nation, or anyone who cares...They forced us to flee. It is a picture that haunts me and that I'll never forget. Thirty thousand human beings walking, weeping... screaming in terror...women with babies in their arms and children tugging at their skirts...and the Israeli soldiers pushing them on with their guns. Some people fell by the wayside, some never got up again. It was terrible. One thinks: this isn't life, this isn't human. Once you have seen this, your heart and your brain are transformed."
Unfortunately, thanks to the recycling ad nauseam of Fallaci's febrile fantasies on innumerable crank websites, it is the fabricated Habash, rather than the real, that most people will be exposed to.
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