A Blight Unto the Nations

Seldom does the abyss between fact and fiction yawn more widely than in The Economist:

"Little Israel commands attention because it has a big history: biblical romance and technological talent; the slaughter of the Holocaust and military prowess, energetic democracy and the long occupation of land claimed and inhabited by Palestinians." (King Bibi: a parable of modern populism, The Economist/ The Australian, 30/3/19)

"Israel offers an important test of the resilience of democracy. On April 9 voters face a fateful choice. Re-elect Netanyahu and reward him for subverting the independence of Israel's institutions. Or turf him out in the hope of rebuilding trust in democracy - and aspiring to be 'a light unto the nations'." (ibid)

Lest we forget, April 9 will be the 71st anniversary of the massacre of the Palestinian villagers of Deir Yassin, carried out by Irgun terrorists on orders from their leader, Menachem Begin, in 1948.

Begin, of course, went on to found Israel's ruling Likud party in 1973, becoming its prime minister from 1977-83, and presiding over the brutal invasion (1982) and occupation (1982-2000) of Lebanon.

Netanyahu is his ideological heir, presiding in turn over one massacre after another - operations Returning Echo (2012), Pillar of Defence (2012) and Protective Edge (2014) - against the largely defenceless inhabitants of the blockaded Gaza ghetto, not to mention the ongoing bloodletting along the Gaza border.

And how does The Economist spin this butcher's bloody record?

"With deft use of diplomacy and the mostly cautious use of military force he has boosted security without being sucked into disastrous wars." (ibid)

Deir Yassin: 65 Years Today

Today is the 65th anniversary of Palestine's infamous Deir Yassin massacre.

The following diary entries - April 10 & 14 1948 - by American Quaker Christina Jones, a teacher at the Friends' Boys' School in Ramallah at the time, provide a near real-time, albeit second hand, account of the massacre and its aftermath. Particularly prophetic is Jones' reference in the second entry to "an apartheid Jewish State":

[10 April] "The most tragic and dastardly act of the Stern and Irgun occurred at Deir Yasin yesterday afternoon. These terrorists went into the village and massacred 250* old men, women and children and threw their bodies into the village well. Young men of the village were at work in Jerusalem and in their fields. The survivors are being cared for at Beit Safafa. It does not seem possible that it can be true, but the story is confirmed by the International Red Cross delegates and representatives of some of the consulates who have gone to the village. We wonder what the effect will be when the news reaches Lake Success. The fact that it has happened while the Mandate Government is still here indicates the attitude of the Zionists towards it and Great Britain, and sadly underlies their confidence in the support of the USA. To say that this has created panic in surrounding villages puts the situation mildly...

[14 April] "We hear that the terrorists are driving through Jerusalem streets using loud-speakers to warn the people to leave or Deir Yasin will be their fate also. More news of the horrible incident comes to us. The Arabs are surprised that Deir Yasin should be the village attacked, for the people there were thought to be too friendly to the Jews in the past. The village so near to Jerusalem is strategically located for Jewish development, but I am inclined to think it is just part of the campaign to rid the country of Arabs in order to make more room for immigrants so that an apartheid** Jewish State may be set up. I hope I am wrong. It is almost more than one can bear to be so near such a great human tragedy and such sheer brutality." (The Untempered Wind: Forty Years in Palestine, 1975, pp 88-89)

Jones elaborates on her 1948 diary entries thus:

"Statements made by Zionist leaders following the Deir Yasin massacre give chilling reasons for it. In his book, The Revolt, [Menachem] Begin, who commanded the Irgun Zvai Leumi, writes that the terror inspired by this massacre resulted in the 'maddened uncontrolled stampede of 635,000 Arabs... the political and economic significance of this development can hardly be over-estimated.' Ben Gurion, on his part, said: 'Without Deir Yasin, there would be no Israel.' And later Dr Weizmann, first president of Israel, referred to the Arab flight as 'a miraculous simplification of Israel's tasks'... As we watched events during those days, it seemed obvious that the Zionists, fearing a reversal of the United Nations policy, were determined to get all the territory allotted to them in the partition scheme before the end of the Mandate Government and face the world with a fait accompli. The first step was to dispossess the Arabs. Before the British left Palestine, there were already more than 200,000 refugees, and they did not flee from their homes with the thought that it would be for ever." (p 89-90)

[*The accepted figure today is just over 100;** The Reunited National Party of Daniel F. Malan won power in South Africa on an apartheid platform on 26 May 1948. According to Israeli scholar Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, "An official South African source is not alone in claiming that Daniel F. Malan visited Israel in May of 1948, but there seems to be no evidence for that claim... Malan actually visited Israel in September of 1953; he was the first foreign prime minister ever to do so." (The Israeli Connection: Whom Israel Arms & Why, 1987, p 110)]

Nakba Day 2012

The title song of Phil Monsour's new CD*, Ghosts of Deir Yassin, says it all:

They pretend that it's forgotten
But somewhere small flowers grow
On the weathered stones of destroyed homes
Somewhere the light's still in the window

You see that we are rising, our day is surely coming
No longer in the shadows
Of the ghosts of Deir Yassin

They change the names on the signs
But it's in our hearts these words are written
Of the children who don't know their homes
They will walk the streets from which they are forbidden

You see that we are rising, our day is surely coming
No longer in the shadows
Of the ghosts of Deir Yassin

And of the old ones now passed on
But it's their blood our hearts are pumping
They will walk with us when we return to their towns
Whose names will live again

You see that we are rising, our day is surely coming
No longer in the shadows
Of the ghosts of Deir Yassin

You see that we are rising
You know the fear is gone
We will return

You see that we are rising, our day is surely coming
We are no longer in the shadows
Of the ghosts of Deir Yassin

You see that we are rising, our day is surely coming
We are no longer in the shadows
Of the ghosts of Deir Yassin

[*View it/buy it - at philmonsour.com]

Sheridan: Nakba Denier

Part of the transcript of ABC TV's Q&A program, 7/5/09:

TONY JONES: Let's just hear from Guy Rundle [journalist, crikey.com].
GUY RUNDLE (to Mark Arbib [Parliamentary Secretary for Government Service Delivery]) : What do you think of Randa's [Randa Abdel-Fattah, author & lawyer] argument that Israel was founded on ethnic cleansing and the dispossession of a people?
MARK ARBIB: Well, sorry, I understand the argument, and I certainly understand the argument in terms of dispossession, but in terms of ethnic cleansing, I don't accept that. [So you accept that the Palestinians were dispossessed, but not ethnically cleansed?!]
GUY RUNDLE: But where - but hang on, Mark, when Israeli historians like Benny Morris use the Israel Defense Forces archives to document dozens of massacres of Palestinian people in 1948; men, women and children lined up against a wall and machined gunned by, among other people, Menachem Begin, who became a prime minister of Israel...
GREG SHERIDAN: No. No. No. I don't think we can accept anything that Guy Rundle is saying as true here.
GUY RUNDLE: That is absolutely true. Hang on. Absolutely true.
GREG SHERIDAN: It's all rubbish. That is just rubbish.
GUY RUNDLE: Yes, he has said that.

And what has Benny Morris said? "In certain conditions expulsion is not a war crime. I don't think the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands... There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing... What the new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought. To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape." (Interviewed by Ari Shavit in Haaretz, 9/1/04 - See my 11/5/08 post Benny Unhinged) Morris went on to quantify these massacres (24) and rapes (about a dozen).

And here's his account of the best known massacre, that of the Palestinian villagers of Deir Yassin: "The attacking units [Jewish terrorists of the Irgun, Stern Gang and Haganah: MERC] had advanced from house to house, lobbing grenades and spraying the interiors with fire... They blew up several houses with explosives. The attackers shot down individuals and families as they left their homes and fled down alleyways. They apparently also rounded up villagers, who included militiamen and unarmed civilians of both sexes, and murdered them, and executed prisoners in a nearby quarry. On 12 April, Haganah Intelligence Service (HIS) officer in command (OC) in Jerusalem, Yitzhak Levy, reported: 'The conquest of the village was carried out with great cruelty. Whole families - women, old people, children, were murdered viciously by their captors'. The following day he added: 'LHI [Stern Gang] members tell of the barbaric behaviour of the IZL [Irgun] toward the prisoners and the dead. They also relate that the IZL men raped a number of Arab girls and murdered them afterward [we don't know if this is true]'. The HIS operative on the spot, Mordechai Gichon, reported on 1o April: 'Their [ie, the IZL?] commander says that the [initial] order was: To take prisoner the adult males and to send the women and children to Motza. In the afternoon [of April 9], the order was changed and became to kill all the prisoners... The adult males were taken to town in trucks and paraded in the city streets, then taken back to the site and killed with rifle and machine-gun fire. Before they [ie, other inhabitants] were put on the trucks, the IZL and LHI men... took from them all the jewlry and stole their money. The behaviour toward them was especially barbaric [and included] kicks, shoves with rifle butts, spitting and cursing [people from Givat Shaul took part in the torture]'. Gichon reported that the HIS's 'regular informer', 'the mukhtar's son', was 'executed [in front of his mother and sisters] after being taken prisoner'. Meir Pa'il, a Palmah intelligence officer who claimed to have spent part of the afternoon of April 9 in Deir Yassin as a 'guest' of the LHI, reported on 10 April: 'In the quarry near Givat Shaul I saw the 5 Arabs they had paraded in the streets of the city. They had been murdered and were lying one on top of the other... I saw with my own eyes several families [that had been] murdered with their women, children and old people, their corpses were lying on top of each other... The dissidents were going about the village robbing and stealing everything: Chickens, radio sets, sugar, money, gold and more... Each dissident walked about the village dirty with blood and proud of the number of persons he had killed...' Altogether about 100-120 villagers died that day." (The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2004, pp 237-238)