The Ongoing Nakba

An important message from Palestinian BDS National Committee, 26/7/19:

"Israel just committed its biggest crime of ethnic cleansing since 1967, [destroying] the homes of hundreds of Palestinian families in... Wadi Hummus in occupied East Jerusalem Another 116... homes are under imminent threat of demolition in Wadi Hummus. The magnitude of the crime is not only its sheer scale. Israel is only able to maintain this ongoing Nakba because governments, institutions and companies support its crimes. Volvo, Caterpillar and Hyundai Heavy Industries are involved... HP-branded corporations play key roles... Banks such as HSBC and financial institutions like AXA fund Israel's deadly military and security industry. It has been three years since the UN voted to establish a database of companies involved in Israel's illegal settlement enterprise in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The database remains unpublished due to political pressure from the US, Israel and some European states. It is more needed than ever today as an effective tool for seeking justice and accountability. Thousands of homeless and displaced Palestinians are waiting for remedies... Justice delayed is justice denied." (Justice delayed is justice denied)

The NeverEnding Nakba

"Israeli soldiers have shot 16 people at the Gaza frontier on a day of rallies commemorating the mass displacement of Palestinians during the war that led to Israel's creation in 1948. Each year... on 15 May, Palestinians mark the nakba, or catastrophe..." (Israeli forces shoot 16 Palestinian protesters at Gaza frontier, Oliver Holmes/ Hazem Balousha, theguardian.com, 16/5/19)

Quite how the above squares with this later paragraph is anyone's guess:

"Gaza's health ministry said a total of 65 people were wounded by live fire, shrapnel, rubber-coated steel bullets and tear gas. It said the 65 included 22 children and three paramedics." (ibid)

Certainly Israel's Haaretz made no bones about it. Here's their lead paragraph:

"Sixty five Gazans were injured Wednesday as Israeli security forces used live fire, tear gas and skunk spray against 10,000 protesters commemorating Nakba Day along the Gaza border, the Palestinian Health Ministry reported." (10,000 Gazans march on Nakba Day, 65 injured in clashes with Israeli forces, Yaniv Kubovich & Jack Khoury, 15/5/19)

Benny Morris, Again

Today is Nakba Day. So I thought I'd reflect on the latest emission by Israeli 'historian' Benny Morris, author of the 1988 book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, written at a time when he could have passed muster as an historian, albeit relying exclusively on Israeli archival material for his tome. Whatever Morris' worth as a historian back then, he has unfortunately undergone a precipitous decline to the point where, today, he is little more than a peddler of pro-Zionist hasbara. Indeed, one could say that the scholarly worth of an historian of the Palestine problem is in inverse proportion to his Zionism, and that there is no better example of the applicability of this axiom than Benny Morris.

What follows is his attack in the current issue of The Atlantic on the views of Palestinian-American legislator, Rashida Tlaib. I have reproduced here only the historical component of Morris' hatchet job on Tlaib, and interpolated my own comments in his text (in italics in square brackets), as well as the wonderfully acid, tweeted commentary of Asad Abukhalil (aka The Angry Arab) (in bold in square brackets) on same. Morris' distortions of the Palestinian past are enough to discredit what he has to say on the more recent history of the Palestine problem:

"On Friday, Representative Rashida Tlaib was attacked by President Donald Trump for a 'horrible and highly insensitive statement on the Holocaust' and for having 'tremendous hatred of... the Jewish people.' Trump's off-base attack distracted from the actual problems with Tlaib's account of the Arab-Israeli conflict, in which she deployed deliberately imprecise language, misleading her listeners about the early history of the conflict in Palestine and misrepresenting its present and future.

"Tlaib told the hosts of the Yahoo News podcast Skullduggery that when she remembers the Holocaust, it has a 'calming' effect on her to think that it was my ancestors, Palestinians, who lost their land, and some their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity; their existence in some ways had been wiped out... all of it in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post the Holocaust, post the tragedy and terrific persecution of Jews across the world [sic] at that time.' She was, she said, 'humbled by the fact that it was [my Palestinian] ancestors that had to suffer for that to happen.'

"But the historical reality was quite different from what Tlaib described: The Palestinians indirectly, and in some ways directly, aided in the destruction of European Jewry.

"After Hitler's accession to power in Germany in 1933, German and then European Jews sought escape and safe havens. But all the Western countries, including the United States and Britain and its dominions, closed their doors to significant Jewish immigration. [In large part because the Zionist movement wanted them only in Palestine.] Palestine emerged as the only potential safe haven. In 1932, the British allowed 9,500 Jews to immigrate to Palestine. In 1933, the number shot up to 30,000, and in 1935, it peaked at 62,000.

"But from 1933 onward, Palestine's Arabs - led by the cleric Muhammad Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem - mounted a strident campaign to pressure the British, who governed Palestine, to bar all Jews from entering the country. [You are telling me that the Palestinians were opposed to the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Jews who wanted to create a Jewish state on Palestinian lands and who wanted to displace the natives? And they were opposed to that? That is certainly anti-Semitic. If the Palestinians wanted to prove they were not anti-Semitic they should have given up their homeland, and told the Jewish immigrants to take it over, and they should even have welcomed the bullets and bombs directed against them. Anything less would indeed be anti-Semitic. Just think of it this way, if millions of Muslims wanted to come to America against the wishes of the American population and create a Muslim state over all the US, and if the Americans were to oppose their plan, would that not be outright anti-Islam bigotry? Think about it. Benny Morris may have a point here. Not only that, as Morris tells us, those impudent Palestinians revolted against those who occupied their homeland.] To press home their demand, in 1936 they launched an anti-British and anti-Zionist rebellion that lasted three years. [How dare they!] Apart from throwing out the British, the rebellion's aim was to coerce London into halting all Jewish entry into Palestine.

"Moreover, the anti-Jewish violence [Well, the Zionists were indeed Jewish and they wanted to create a state atop Palestine. So Palestinians should have fought Buddhists and Hindus just to prove they were not anti-Semitic?], which claimed the lives of hundreds of Jews and wounded many more, itself served to deter would-be emigrants from seeking to move to Palestine. [And Palestinians should have been mindful of this and abandoned their opposition to mass immigration? Seriously?] British entry certificates for Jews to Palestine declined to 30,000 in 1936, 10,000 in 1937, and 15,000 in 1938. Those who couldn't get in were left stranded in Germany, Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere. Almost all died in the Holocaust, which the Germans unleashed in 1941.

"But the Palestinians' contribution to the Holocaust was also more direct. Husseini, having fled Palestine during the revolt, helped pro-Nazi [but only because they were against the British occupation of their homeland] generals launch an anti-British rebellion in Iraq in 1941 (which itself engendered a large-scale pogrom against Baghdad's Jews, the Farhoud). [As Orit Bashkin, a genuine historian, cautions in her nuanced account of the Farhud ('New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq' (2012)) "a distinction should be made between an analysis of the Farhud and the Farhudization of Jewish Iraqi history - viewing the Farhud as typifying the overall history of the relationship between Jews and greater Iraqi society." As a Zionist, of course, Morris indulges simplistically in the latter. As Bashkin points out: "The Jewish community strived for integration in Iraq before and after the Farhud. In fact, the attachment of the community to Iraq was so tenacious that even after such a horrible event, most Jews continued to believe that Iraq was their homeland. The vision was shattered only by the realities created following the 1948 war in Palestine." (pp 138-39) That Zionism was the undoing of Iraq's Jews (among other Jewish communities in the Arab world) is made abundantly clear by Bashkin: "Equating Judaism and Zionism imperiled Jewish communities in Arab countries. Rather than thinking about the ways in which Arab regimes served colonialism, Arabs began worrying about whether the Jews living among them were serving the interests of Zionism. In this sense British colonialism created a Jewish problem in countries where there had not been one before. There were no conflicts between Arabs and Jews in countries where there had not been one before. There were no conflicts between Arabs and Jews in Ottoman Palestine prior to the arrival of British colonialism and Zionism." (p 160)]

"When that rebellion failed, he fled to Berlin, where he was given a villa and a generous monthly salary, and lived in comfort until the end of the world war. During the war, he helped recruit Muslims from the Balkans for the German army and the SS, and in radio broadcasts exhorted Middle Eastern and North African Arabs to launch jihad against the British and 'kill the Jews.' (The texts of Husseini's broadcasts appear in the historian Jeffrey Herf's book The Jewish Enemy.) [Herf btw, although a Zionist historian, is at pains in a 2014 essay, 'Haj Amin, al-Husseini, the Nazis & the Holocaust', to point out that Husseini "did not have an impact on Hitler's decision to murder the Jews of Europe." He also makes no distinction in his essay between Judaism, the faith and Zionism, the political ideology, yet hypocritically critiques Husseini, a Muslim cleric, for failing to make the same distinction. Incredibly, Herf also writes thus of the Nakba: "While acknowledging pressure from other groups that made war in 1948 seem inevitable, the war of 1948 and the Arab-Israeli conflict may not have taken place without al-Husseini... " IOW, Ben-Gurion's Zionists would have taken their cue from a Jewish state-accepting/collaborating Husseini, and Zionists and Palestinians would have lived happily ever after together in the same land. Some fairy tale that!]

"Subsequently, Hussein fled Germany and, with the Allies reluctant to trigger Arab anger by trying him for collaboration [seeing the British were responsible for driving Husseini into Hitler's arms in the first place], settled down in Cairo. In 1947, he rejected the UN partition plan to settle the Palestine conflict and helped launch the first Palestinian and pan-Arab war against the Zionist enterprise. He spent his last years in Lebanon, embittered by the loss of Palestine and the pan-Arab failure to effectively support the Palestinians, and published a series of anti-Semitic articles before his death in 1974.

"The most prominent Palestinian American intellectual, Edward Said, toward the end of his life enjoined the Palestinians to study the Holocaust and empathize with what had happened to the Jews, if only to properly understand the deep-seated fears and aspirations of the Israelis. It would seem that Tlaib has forsworn such an effort. [I have no idea here just what Morris is referring to here when he paraphrases Edward Said - propagandists generally don't do footnotes - but let me conclude this post with the following eminently commonsense reflection of Said's on the Holocaust and the fate of the Palestinians, written in 2002 during Israel's cruel West Bank rampage, Operation Defensive Shield: "Every human calamity is different, so there is no point in trying to look for equivalence between one and the other. But it is certainly true that one universal truth about the Holocaust is not only that it should never again happen to Jews, but that as a cruel and collective punishment, it should not happen to any people at all. But if there is no point in looking for equivalence, there is a value in seeing analogies and perhaps hidden similarities, even as we preserve a sense of proportion. Quite apart from his actual history of mistakes, Yasir Arafat is now being made to feel like a hunted Jew by the state of the Jews. There is no gainsaying the fact that the greatest irony of his siege by the Israeli army in his ruined Ramallah compound is that his ordeal has been planned and carried out by a psychopathic leader (Ariel Sharon) who claims to represent the Jewish people. I do not want to press the analogy too far, but it is true to say that Palestinians under Israeli occupation today are as powerless as Jews were in the 1940s. Israel's army, airforce, and navy, heavily subsidized by the United States, have been wreaking havoc on the totally defenseless civilian population of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. For the past half century the Palestinians have been a dispossessed people, millions of them refugees, most of the rest under a 35-year-old military occupation, at the mercy of armed settlers who systematically have been stealing their land and an army that has killed them by the thousands. Thousands more have been imprisoned, thousands have lost their livelihoods, made refugees for the second or third time, all of them without civil or human rights." (From the essay Low point of powerlessness in Said's 2004 book From Oslo to Iraq and the Roadmap,  pp 206-07)]

Death of a Sheikh

Just a reminder that Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestine - the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) - is not a thing of the past. The mass expulsion of Palestinian Arab civilians by Zionist terror gangs began well before the creation of Israel and the intervention of Arab state forces in May 1948, and continued up until armistice lines were agreed to in March 1949. There were, of course, more mass expulsions when Israeli forces overran the West Bank in 1967.

But that doesn't mean that Israel wasn't busy doing what it does best in the 18 years between 1949 and 1967, when Jordan controlled the West Bank.

The following incident occurred in 1952, just one of many examples of Israeli brutality against Palestine's indigenous Arab population recorded by Commander E.H. Hutchison, USNR, in his memoir, Violent Truce: A Military Observer Looks at the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1951-1955 (1956). (Hutchison was an Observer in the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization's (UNTSO) Mixed Armistice Commission (MAC) in Jerusalem from 1951-54):

"Since the beginning of the Armistice, Jordan and Egypt had complained on many occasions that Israel was cutting down her Arab population by driving Bedouins and even Arab villagers across the border. Israel was condemned in some instances but had taken no steps to allow the return of the Arabs.

"On September 17, 1952, an incident occurred that gave us a chance to study one of these cases first hand. It gave us an interesting insight into the lot of the Bedouin and the village Arab still living inside Israel. On the morning of the 17th, Major Itzaq, Senior Jordan Military Delegate to the MAC, called to inform us that the Israelis had expelled ten families of the es-Sani tribe and that they had been stopped inside the Jordan border south of Hebron. This wasn't the only call during the week concernong the es-Sanis and on the 22nd of the month we went into the area and counted over 100 families, nearly 1,000 members of the tribe, camped temporarily just inside Jordan... [From] the only tent that had been pitched, an old man stepped out... He looked fierce, but his eyes twinkled. Sheikh El Hajj Ibrahim es-Sani beckoned us to his tent.

"In the Western World the table pounding would have started at once - but not here. Solemn greetings were exchanged... It was fully thirty minutes before the District Police Commander expressed his regrets that his government could not allow the es-Sani tribe to remain in Jordan. He hastened to explain that Jordan's arable lands were already crowded, and if the es-Sanis were allowed to stay, Israel would push other tribes across the border. There were still approximately 15,000 Bedouins in the Negev.

"Sheikh Ibrahim listened attentively; occasionally he cast his eyes upwards and spread his hands in a gesture of despair. When the district commander had finished, there was a minute of dead silence. El Hajj Ibrahim looked from one to the other and then dramatically presented his case. According to him the es-Sanis were once a rich tribe. Their many herds grazed over the lands of the Negev but the people, other than those assigned to tend the herds, lived on the lands they cultivated southeast of Beersheba... At the end of the Arab-Jewish hostilities, the Israelis forced them to leave these lands and move to El Laqiya, northeast of Beersheba. The land there was poor, but they worked hard, and during the next three years they had made it productive to the extent that Israel declared a quantity of their grain as surplus crop and demanded that it be sold to the government at a fixed price. El Hajj Ibrahim continued. He explained that over a month ago the Israeli Military Government had told him Israel was going to establish a settlement at El Laqiya and that his tribe would have to move to Tel Arad. He knew the Tel Arad area well and, seeing no possibility of survival there, ignored the order. A week later the Israelis brought in tractors and representatives of a land company; work was started on the es-Sani lands. El Hajj Ibrahim took his complaint to the Israeli courts and, according to him, they granted him a provisional judgment against both the Military Governor of Beersheba and the land company engaged in the work. The tribe was given permission to stay at El Laqiya.

"The legal action, however, did not stop the Israeli Military Governor, who moved in rapidly to enforce his demands. When he stated that the tribe would have to go to Tel Arad, by force if necessary, the old Sheikh countered by saying that he would move his tribe to Jordan before he would go to Tel Arad. The Military Governor explained that this would be against the terms of the Armistice with Jordan but that he would make no attempt to stop the move. El Hajj Ibrahim took the offer and the border east of El Laqiya, usually carefully guarded by Israel against infiltration, remained open until his tribe crossed into Jordan. 'Now,' he concluded in a shout, 'you stop me. Where can I lead my people?' El Hajj angrily whacked the carpeted ground.

"Following this conference we immediately arranged for a meeting between the Israeli and Jordanian representatives at the border area near the scene of the crossing. Here we were informed by the Military Governor of Beersheba, Lt. Colonel Hermann, and the Chief Israeli Delegate to the MAC, Lt. Colonel Ramati, that El Hajj Ibrahim es-Sani had asked if he could move his tribe, 'residents of Tel Arad,' into Jordan. The Military Governor stated that he had told the Sheikh he could not grant such permission but would not object to the move... After days of bickering it was finally arranged for the tribe to return to Israel, although the Israelis wanted them transported inside Jordan to a point opposite and closer to Tel Arad. The Jordanians refused to do this and it was finally settled that the transfer would be made at the original point of crossing, on the Hebron-Beersheba road.

"It was October 26, before the es-Sanis were back in Israel. Seventeen of the tribe members had vanished deeper into Jordan and the search for them was not pressed. The crossing was a drama of frustration and despair driven by an unrelenting force. The Israeli court action was forgotten. By allowing the es-Sanis to cross into Jordan under threat of being sent to Tel Arad, the Israeli Military Governor had very cleverly been able to make credulous his claim that these were nomadic people who should not be allowed to control the more productive areas. Lt. Colonel Hermann, who admittedly pressured the tribe to leave their lands and openly allowed them to cross into Jordan, now blandly stated, with authoritative cunningness, that the es-Sanis had broken the laws against crossing the border and must be held responsible for the violation.

"On the days of the crossing operation, the Israelis turned out in a show of force. Five trucks were brought from Beersheba for which the tribe was charged L160 per truck, per trip. The grain was resacked and loaded on the trucks; nothing else was taken on these trucks. The grain was not being sent with the tribe. It was being placed in separate storage where, as I was told, an amount would be deducted to cover the cost of the crossing operation plus an amount to cover the back taxes and surplus grain claimed by the Israeli Government.

"Armed Israelis sat next to armed Arabs as the members of the tribe filed across the border. The men were searched by soldiers and police. The women were taken under a bridge where they were similarly inspected by Israeli police women. Many arguments broke out and displays of temper frequently brought the always present tension near the breaking point. The Sheikh paced among the members of his tribe, alternately shouting orders and offering words of consolation. He was visibly under a great strain.

"Towards evening on October 26, the last truck, piled high with tents and personal belongings, lurched over the border. The stragglers of the tribe were precariously perched on top of the load. I walked over to Sheikh Ibrahim and his eldest son, Mohammed, who were preparing to follow their tribe. We shook hands solemnly. Mohammed had lost none of the anger he had displayed throughout the operation. His lips drew tight: 'What you have seen is all that is left of a once prosperous and respected tribe.'

"The old Sheikh cupped his left hand over our handclasp in friendship. He was still very much the leader - in his memory, the leader of a proud and carefree people. Now, his eyes reflected defeat. Three weeks later a small notice appeared in the Israeli papers which stated that Sheikh El Hajj Ibrahim es-Sani had died at Tel Arad." (pp 30-37)

NB: Hutchison gives the figure of 5,491 Arabs driven from Israel into Jordan from June 1949 to October 1954 (p 91)

What Ethnic Cleansing? 2

So what happened to Safad? Here's the account in Nafez Nazzal's study, The Palestinian Exodus from Galilee 1948 (1978):

"Although 200 to 250 men of Safad were armed with various kinds of rifles and 35 to 50 rounds of ammunition each, very few had any systematic military training; they depended greatly on the Arab forces positioned in the city. Nevertheless when the Zionists attacked 'Ein ez Zeitun, the Arab [volunteer] forces refused to join in the fighting and would not permit the militia to join the villagers in defending themselves, assuring everyone that Shishakli and his men would repulse an attack on the city, and that the task of the Arab forces in Safad and the militia was to defend the city. The people of Safad became discouraged and lost confidence in their forces. 'Issa 'Abid al-Khadrah, a merchant and a member of the Safad militia, recounted:

'We could not defend the city, nor did we count on the Arab forces to protect it. Rumours spread that the Jews had been given 'Ein ez Zeitun... The fall of this village left the city besieged from the south, east and north. We felt that the Arab forces did not try to prevent this situation... If Sari Fnaish and his men did not protect 'Ein ez Zeitun, what would make you think he would protect Safad... what interest would they have in defending Safad but not 'Ein ez Zeitun?'

"The decisive battle for Safad began on the night of May 9-10. The Palmach opened heavy artillery fire on all positions occupied by by Arab forces in the city. Their use of the homemade mortar, the Davidka, which produced a great deal of noise, left the people of Safad in a state of shock. Usamah al-Naqib, a member of the militia reported:

'On the night of the attack, the responsible Arab commanders: Shishakli, Sari Fnaish, Ihsan Kamlamaz (trainer of the local militia); were out of the city. We did not have a unified command. Everyone fought on his own... We were unaware of what was happening in the other quarters of the city. Rumours spread that the ALA [Arab Liberation Army] had begun to withdraw... The people of Safad began to flee in panic. We could not find out what was happening... It was raining hard. We knew we could not sustain the defence of our city alone and so by midnight decided to retreat. We heard that the city fell to the Jews by the morning.'

"The fall of Safad on May 10, 1948 was a great shock to the Palestinians in Galilee. The villagers of the Hula Valley were disheartened and terrified; a great number of the villagers in Eastern Galilee began to flee. Almost all of the villages surrounding the city of Safad were now evacuated."

In Michael Palumbo's The Palestinian Catastrophe: The 1948 Expulsion of a People from their Homeland (1987), you can read about the sickening murder of a group of Arab POWs by a hoe-wielding  Israeli intelligence officer (pp 114-15). On page 115, you'll also find the admission of Yigal Allon, Commander in Chief of the Palmach, that his aim with regard to Safad and its surrounding villages was "to cleanse the Upper Galilee and create a continuous strip of Israeli territory in the region," and that he wanted to do this before May 15.

In Ilan Pappe's more recent book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), we learn that while the Palmach had 1,000 well-trained troops, the Arab volunteer force was only 400 strong, only half of whom were armed with rifles (p 97). Then there's this revelation on p 98: "The Palmach troops drove most of the people out, only allowing 100 old people to stay on, though not for long. On 5 June, Ben-Gurion noted dryly in his diary: 'Abraham Hanuki, from [Kibbutz] Ayelet Hashahar, told me that since there were only 100 old people left in Safad they were expelled to Lebanon."

The likes of journalists such as Michael Bachelard need to ponder and understand this simple fact:

"In virtually every war of modern and ancient times civilians have been forced to flee to escape the fighting, taking refuge elsewhere until, with the cessation of hostilities, they could return to their homes. [But] what occurred in Palestine during the war of 1947-49 was an exodus of a fundamentally different character. It involved the systematic expulsion of most of the Arab population from its homes, and its exile from Palestine, as part of a premeditated scheme to transform radically the demography of the country in fulfilment of the colonial ideal of Zionism - making Palestine 'as Jewish as England is English.' This colonial settler nature of Zionism - the substitution of one people for another by force of arms - and the tragic situation it has created in Palestine over the past half century, is at the heart of the current conflict in the Middle East, although this essential fact has unfortunately been obscured by Israeli and much Western scholarship on the Palestine question." (From Rashid Khalidi's  foreword to Nazzal's book cited above, p IX)

But Bachelard not only clouds the reality of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, he goes on in his pathetic piece on Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp to broadcast the following Israeli propaganda trope: "We are in a concrete room inside a concrete jungle, behind concrete walls administered by an unyielding Lebanese state that believes these people to be a demographic problem, and so is adamant that these men, and their families, will never become citizens."

What an exercise in reality inversion is that!

No mention whatever that Israel, not Lebanon's concerns with disrupting its confessional balance, is the root cause of the Palestinian refugee problem as exemplified in Ain al-Hilweh and other Palestinian refugee camps throughout the Middle East.

A mere tweak of Bachelard's text suffices to illustrate the extent of his cover-up of this elementary fact: '... an unyielding Jewish state that believes these people to be a demographic problem, and so is adamant that these men, and their families, will never be allowed to return to their Palestinian homeland and become equal citizens with Israeli Jews.'

Better by far that Bachelard had never set foot in Lebanon than do propaganda service for apartheid Israel.

What Ethnic Cleansing? 1

Please tell me what is the point of 'journalism' such as this if not to keep readers in the dark and shield the apartheid state from the pariah status it so richly deserves:

"When the state of Israel was being formed in 1948, and a war with the Arab world raged, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled their homes into neighbouring Lebanon and set up temporary camp." (The day I drank (bad) coffee with heavily armed militants, Michael Bachelard, The Sun-Herald, 11/11/18)

Nothing like the old passive voice to avoid the fact that Israel was created in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. And nothing like a hyped "war with the Arab world," to divert attention from the fact that that the campaign of ethnic cleansing began long before Arab League troops moved to put a stop to it.

Bachelard is either involved in self-censorship here, or is one of those who can see ethnic cleansing everywhere but Palestine.

The "heavily armed militants" with whom this late-sipper shared "(bad) coffee," were residents of Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp near Sidon in south Lebanon, more than 95% of whose inhabitants originally came from the kaza of Safad and the surrounding area, in northern Palestine, according to French Middle East scholar Bernard Rougier's study of the camp, Everyday Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam among Palestinians in Lebanon (2004 French/ 2007 English translation).

The Palestinian city of Safad, now Israeli, and its surrounding villages, now in ruins, are situated in the eastern Galilee, so let's examine, shall we, what exactly went on there before any Arab armies arrived on the scene on May 15 when the British Mandate over Palestine officially ended.

Take, for example, the village of Ayn az-Zaytun, some 1.5 kilometres north of Safad, whose inhabitants cultivated olives, grain and fruit.

It was first attacked by Zionist forces as early as January 1948. Later, it was occupied by Palmach forces on May 1, 1948, as a prelude to the occupation of Safad.  These Zionist shock troops first unleashed a mortar barrage at 3 am, followed by a ground assault. After taking the village, they rounded up its inhabitants.

As Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi recounts in his exhaustive study All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied & Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (1992):

"The men... were taken away and the rest were humiliated and expelled while shots were fired over their heads, according to the villagers' testimony and Israeli sources. As for the men, some were later expelled and enabled to join their families, but 37 of them, selected at random, were taken captive. According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, they were probably among a group of 70 people later massacred in a gully between  'Ayn al-Zaytun and Safad under orders from Moshe Kelman, the commander of the Palmach's Third Battalion. Morris reports that... after the prisoners were killed, and in anticipation of a Red Cross visit to the area, he ordered their hands to be untied, to conceal the fact that the killing had been done in cold blood.

"Several villagers attempted to return to their homes over the next couple of days but were fired upon by the Palmach; one of them was killed, according to Morris. As for the village houses, they were burned or blown up by Palmach sappers on 2 and 3 May. The destruction was carried out partly in order to terrify the inhabitants of Safad, who could watch the spectacle from nearby hills. The sight of the village being leveled had a demoralizing effect in the city, as well as in the surrounding villages of eastern Galilee." (p 437)

Continued in my next post...

Great Moments in 'Judeo-Christianity'

It was good to see favourable reviews of Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir's latest film, Wajib, in both the Fairfax and Murdoch press recently. Just one sentence in Sandra Hall's review in the Sydney Morning Herald of 11/10/18, however, cries out for clarification:

"Because of a large concentration of Arab Christians, [Nazareth's] Palestinians were allowed to stay on after the Israeli takeover in 1948."

To begin with why is the genocidal onslaught undertaken against the Palestinians by Israeli forces at this time invariably glossed over with words such as, in this instance, "takeover," or 'displacement', or some other such euphemism? It's as though, despite the now decades of scholarly research on the horrors of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine's majority Arab (Christian & Muslim) population by Israeli fire and sword in 1948, the mainstream media still hasn't absorbed the fact, or are playing it safe by taking their cue from some Israeli style guide. Maddening!

The other thing about that sentence is that it gives the general reader the false impression that Israel's genocidaires bypassed Nazareth out of respect for the largely Christian population. The Zionist movement had (and has) no more respect for Palestinian Christians that it had (and has) for Palestinian Muslims. Both are Arabs, and their only role in the Zionist scheme of things is to make way for 'the Jewish people'.

Nazareth, the childhood home of Jesus, was only spared to avoid bad PR. As Israeli historian Ilan Pappe explains:

"Ben-Gurion did not wish the city of Nazareth to be depopulated for the simple reason that he knew the eyes of the Christian world were fixed on the city. But a senior general and the supreme commander of the operation [Operation Palm Tree], Moshe Karmil, ordered the total eviction of all the people who had stayed behind ('16,000', noted Ben-Gurion, '10,000 of whom were Christians'). Ben-Gurion now instructed Karmil to retract his oder and let the people stay. He agreed with Ben Donkelman, the military commander of the operations: 'Here the world is watching us,' which meant that Nazareth was luckier than any other city in Palestine. Today Nazareth is still the only Arab city in pre-1967 Israel." (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 2006, pp 170-171)

Candy Royalle 1981-2018 RIP

Memories

I am my grandfather's memories
of sunshine streaming through olive trees,
Of women sitting around and clucking like hens
as they crush garlic with spices to make
that night's meal
whilst men tend gardens
plough the fields
of their baladi
their homeland.

I am my grandfather's memories
remembering that he was raised as a Christian
in a land of Muslims
with Jewish friends.
He played in the dirt
with his future enemies
shared meals
and didn't yet know
that history was in the making
somewhere in Europe.

I am my grandfather's memories
and the things he doesn't even know yet
Like: he was one of millions of pawns
negotiated in a deal
that would alleviate the guilt of the world
for crimes committed
that they had no hand in
there was no hatred -
yet.

I am my grandfather's nightmares
where stories came
horrors that caressed the ears
of him
his parents
others in their community.
It whispered that death
was wiping out whole villages
mass graves were being filled
blood was being shed
so much
that rivers ran upon the earth
turning it crimson.
Violence was making the ard arid
land once fertile -
wasted.

I am my grandfather's nightmares
where he wished to be deaf
to the stories of the nakba.
Where to stay was to die
where to leave was to die -
death comes in many forms
and when your feet can no longer
touch the dirt
you took your first steps upon
that's a form of death too.

I am my grandfather's memories
of the stories coming closer
of terror being sowed
whilst the peasants plowed the land.
He thought of the danger
his aging parents were in
he thought of his own life ahead of him
he'd seen his people torn from the earth
no more roots
they wandered out
dazed
confused
crying for their losses
mourning the dead
asking allah what they did
to deserve this.
He'd seen whole villages
razed to the ground
and he knew
that a knock on the door
was imminent
that the violence ravaging his land
would not stop
in fact it intensified daily
and so knowing that under occupation
was no place to live
he left one day
saying goodbye to his parents
he swore he would send for them
once he had found somewhere safe.

I am my grandfather's memories
as he stepped out that door
one last time
held his hand up
to shield his eyes
breathed in slow through his nostrils
and forced himself to remember
every smell.
He opened his eyes wide
allowed them to sting
and looked upon his village
one last time
he forced himself to remember
every sight
then closed his eyes
and committed to memory
all those memories before 1948
so that he would leave in love
and not hate.
Opening his eyes
I am his memory
of walking away
of the crunch of dirt beneath his feet
listening to the earth's conversation with him
how the wind wished him well
through the trees
and he talked back with his heart
knowing he wouldn't return
he swore to his homeland
it would reside forever inside.

I am my grandfather's memories
as he immigrated to Lebanon
to try to start again.
How he worked long hours
as a refugee in a foreign land
trying to gather the money required
to save his parents
from the death which was beckoning.

I am my grandfather's memories
as he managed to bring his parents over
then start his own family
getting married
having children
tragically losing a wife
getting married again
having more children
and trying to provide for them.

I am my father's memories
of being born into a displaced family
where the homeland is referred to constantly
where he had a sense
that he belonged elsewhere
where the injustice was keenly felt
but where the world seemed not to care
nor understand
the plight of his people.

I am my father's memories
of a family striving to survive
always on the outside
and he as a child growing
in another war-torn country
but knowing that he would leave
before the army could get to him.

I am my father's memories
of being kidnapped twice
and twice being set free
for he did not subscribe
to any form of religious extremism.

I am my father's memories
of constant warfare
being shot by rubber bullets
choking on tear gas
listening to missiles
soar overhead
hoping against all hope
that their bullet-riddled apartment block
would not be hit next.

I am my father's memories
of being 18 and knowing if he did not leave
he would have to bear a weapon
and the death that comes with it -
either behind it
or in front.
So he left that land
knowing that he could never return -
he became a deserter of a war
he did not agree with.
As that plane
ascended towards the heavens
I am his memories of hope
for a better future
but sadness that he may never
see those whom he loves
again.

I am my father's memories
of picking grapes in France
trying to save enough money
to get further away.

I am my father's memory
of boarding a plane for Australia
where he knew my mother to be
and tearing up his passport
arriving as a refugee.

I am my own memory
of being 8 or 9 years old
and listening
to the voice of my grandfather
on a tape he's sent us
from a land I can barely imagine
but whose music I hear
whose food I eat
whose history I am already learning.

I am my own memory
of being 10 or 11 years old
and seeing my Dad
cry for the first time
because we would no longer be
receiving those tapes.
My father who knew his father was dying
and couldn't return
didn't get to say goodbye to his Baba
on his deathbed.
That's when I became
my grandfather's memories
you see he could no longer remember
now that he had been buried.

I am my own memory
of being a teenager
and struggling to exist
between two cultures:
one which sought me to hang on to a past
and one which forced me into the future
one which sought to fill me with love
and one which forced me to belong to this land.

I am my own memory
of trying to understand
why my father was always so angry
until I was old enough to see
that where once my father
had been a warrior
he was now nothing more than a worrier
and I mistook that fear
at losing his family
his land
everything that I took for granted
for anger.

I am my family's blood
where these memories
these histories
course through my veins.
Where my own feet
have not yet touched the soil
of where my great grandfather
my grandfather and
my father's footsteps roamed.

I am the memories of the displaced
the lost
the hidden
the lies
the propaganda
the hatred.

I am the memories
of blue skies
dry heat
homous
tabouli
tabla.

I am the memories
of that lost land
and this land gained.

Gideon Levy: 'Israel is Set to Commit Horrors'

The next Nakba:

"The truth is that Israel is well prepared to massacre hundreds and thousands, and to expel tens of thousands. Nothing will stop it. This is the end of conscience, the show of morality is over. The last few days' events have proved it decisively. The tracks have been laid, the infrastructure for the horror has been cast. Dozens of years of brainwashing, demonization and dehumanization have borne fruit. The alliance between the politicians and the media to suppress reality and deny it has succeeded. Israel is set to commit horrors. Nobody will stand in its way anymore. Not from within or without." (From 60 dead in Gaza & the end of Israeli conscience, Haaretz, 17/5/18)

Some Things Never Change

Yesterday, I quoted the lies of the Zionist fanatic Arthur Koestler back in 1949 to the effect that Israel had a virgin birth in 1948, untainted by any responsibility for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. You'd think that by now - 2018 - with the wealth of evidence to the contrary uncovered by Israeli historians in Zionist archives, that'd be the end of the matter.

But then what's 'evidence to the contrary' to a Zionist fanatic?

"Then we had Randa Abdel-Fattah... who peddles the falsehood that Israel's establishment created 750,000 Arab refugees." (Sydney Writers Festival needs to right a few wrongs, Vic Alhadeff, The Australian, 12/5/18)

Alhadeff is the chief executive officer of the Jewish Board of Deputies.

Israel: Founded on a Pack of Lies

Brace yourselves, you'll be hearing a lot from the msm this week about Israel's so-called 70th 'Independence Day'.

Oliver Holmes' piece in the Guardian on Arthur Koestler, 'Stubbornly fighting for life': how Arthur Koestler reported the birth of Israel, notes that "Seventy years ago, Israel declared independence, and the Manchester Guardian sent the leftwing intellectual to cover the nascent state. But was he an altogether accurate witness?"

Since he was a hottie for Zionism at the time, the bleeding obvious answer would, of course, be a resounding no:

"Koestler began his Israel dispatches," writes Holmes, "in deserted Haifa... where, weeks before his arrival, he reported that most of the port city's 70,000 Arabs had fled amid fierce fighting with Jewish forces. Koestler's take was that 'it fell because the Arab population, though only slightly inferior in numbers and superior in arms, were utterly demoralised through the desertion of their leaders.' The Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary organisation that went on to become the Israel Defense Forces, had broadcast in Arabic the names of the deserters to demoralise the Arab gunmen, he wrote."

In short, Koestler was to the rabidly Zionist Manchester Guardian what Greg Sheridan is to the rabidly Zionist Australian," and his 'reporting' helped create the Zionist myth that, far from being the victims of a Zionist campaign of ethnic cleansing, the Palestinian refugees were responsible for their own plight.

Holmes goes on: "Arabs featured only occasionally in Koestler's articles. 'The native Palestine Arabs,' he said, 'never fought seriously because they had no reason for fighting, having accepted the presence of the Jews with its economic benefit and the de facto partition as accomplished facts.' Travelling down the coastal road from Haifa to Tel Aviv, Koestler said his view was 'confirmed' by Arab farmers in Israel who he said were 'unmolested' while being treated 'with equanimity and trading produce with Jews'. It was not clear if he stopped to speak to them."

Unfortunately, that was the least of Koestler's lies. The following, from Koestler's Promise & Fulfilment (1949), combines Zionist lies with what must surely be the most venomous contempt for the Palestinian victims of Zionist ethnic cleansing ever penned by a journalist at the time:

"A few villages along the road are still populated by Arabs. Some of them are even working in the fields; and a little withered Arab woman is selling oranges to Jewish soldiers out of a basket on her back... But not for long. A few weeks later some Arab lads will start sniping from these villages at Jewish trucks on the road; the Jewish army will herd the villagers together, dynamite their houses, and put the young men into concentration camps; while the old ones will tie a mattress and a brass coffee-pot on the donkey, the old woman will walk ahead leading the donkey by the rein and the old man will ride on it, wrapped in his kefiye, and sunk in solemn meditation about the lost opportunity of raping his youngest grandchild." (pp 199-200)

Fortunately, at least one Zionist writer at the time, S. Yizhar, wrote honestly about Israel's crimes against the Palestinian Arabs in 1948. Yizhar's 1949 novella, Khirbet Khizah, completely destroys the myth that the Palestinians left their ancestral homes and lands for any other reason than to avoid being murdered by marauding Zionist terrorist gangs, bent on seizing control of as much of Palestine - without Palestinians - as they could get away with at the time. (78% as it happens!)

The Khirbet Khizah of the title is a fictional Palestinian village, typifying the fate of the hundreds of Palestinian villages ethnically cleansed and destroyed by Israeli forces in 1948:

"Yes, alas, of course - that was it! Why hadn't I thought of it from the start? Khirbet Khizah was ours. There were the questions of housing and immigrant absorption! Hurray for housing and absorption, in spades: We'll open a canteen, set up a school, and maybe a synagogue. Political parties will come here, and argue about all sorts of things. They'll seed and cultivate the fields, and grow crops. The Hebrew Khirbet Khizah! And who will remember that there was once here that other Khirbet Khizah, from which we evicted and inherited? We came, we shot, we burned, we blew up, we repulsed and shoved off, and we drove into exile. What the hell are we doing in this place?"

Gideon Levy: 'Habash Was Right'

One of Gideon Levy's best essays: This biography makes it clear: The founder f the Palestinian Popular Front was right (Haaretz, 15/4/18):

"George Habash was Israel's absolute enemy for decades, the embodiment of evil, the devil incarnate. Even the title 'Dr.' before his name - he was a pediatrician - was considered blasphemous. Habash was plane hijackings, Habash was terror and terror alone. In a country that doesn't recognize the existence of Palestinian political parties (have you ever heard of a Palestinian political party? - there are only terror groups) knowledge about the man who headed the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was close to zero. What's there to know about him? A terrorist. Subhuman. Should be killed. Enemy. The fact that he was an ideologue and a revolutionary, that his life was shaped by the expulsion from Lod, changed nothing. He remains the plane hijacker from Damascus, the man from the Rejectionist front who was no different from all the rest of the 'terrorists' from Yasser Arafat to Wadi Haddad to Nayef Hawatmeh.

"Now along comes Eli Galia's Hebrew-language book 'George Habash: A Political Biography.' It outlines the reality, far from the noise of propaganda, ignorance and brainwashing, for the Israeli reader who agrees to read a biography of the enemy. Presumably only a few will read it, but this work by Galia, a Middle East affairs expert, is very deserving of praise. It's a political biography, as noted in its subtitle, so it almost entirely lacks the personal, spiritual and psychological dimension; there's not even any gossip. So reading it requires a lot of stamina and specialized tastes. Still, it's fascinating.

"Galia has written a nonjudgmental and certainly non-propagandistic biography. Taking into consideration the Israeli mind today, this isn't to be taken for granted. Galia presents a wealth of information, with nearly a thousand footnotes, about the political path of Habash, a man who was considered dogmatic even though he underwent a number of ideological reversals in his life. If that's dogmatism, what's pragmatism? The dogmatic Habash went through more ideological changes than any Israeli who sticks to the Zionist narrative and doesn't budge an inch - and who of course isn't considered dogmatic.

"In the book, Habash is revealed as a person of many contradictions: a member of the Christian minority who was active in the midst of a large Muslim majority, a bourgeois who became a Marxist, a tough and inflexible leader who was once seen weeping in his room as he wrote an article about Israel's crimes against his people. He had to wander and flee for his life from place to place, sometimes more for fear of Arab regimes than of Israel. He was imprisoned in Syria and fled Jordan, he devoted his life to a revolution that never happened. It's impossible not to admire a person who devoted his life to his ideas, just as you have to admire the scholar who has devoted so much research for so few readers who will take an interest in the dead Habash, in an Israel that has lost any interest in the occupation and the Palestinian struggle.

"The book gives rise to the bleak conclusion that Habash was right. For most of his life he was a bitter enemy of compromises, and Arafat, the man of compromise, won the fascinating historical struggle between the two. They had a love-hate relationship, alternately admiring and scorning each other, and never completely breaking off their connection until Arafat won his Pyrrhic victory. What good have all of Arafat's compromises done for the Palestinian people? What came out of the recognition of Israel, of the settling for a Palestinian state on 22% of the territory, of the negotiations with Zionism and the United States? Nothing but the entrenchment of the Israeli occupation and the strengthening and massive development of the settlement project.

"In retrospect, it makes sense to think that if that's how things were, maybe it would have been better to follow the uncompromising path taken by Habash, who for most of his life didn't agree to any negotiations with Israel, who believed that with Israel it was only possible to negotiate by force, who thought Israel would only change its position if it paid a price, who dreamed of a single, democratic and secular state of equal rights and refused to discuss anything but that. Unfortunately, Habash was right. It's hard to know what would have happened had the Palestinians followed his path, but it's impossible not to admit that the alternative has been a resounding failure.

"Habash, who was born in 1926, wrote about his childhood: 'Our enemies are not the Jews but rather the British... The Jews' relations with the Palestinians were natural and sometimes even good' (p 16). He went to study medicine at the American University in Beirut; his worried mother and father wrote him that he should stay there; a war was on. But Habash returned to volunteer at a clinic in Lod; he returned and he saw. The sight of the Israeli soldiers who invaded the clinic in 1948 ignited in him the flame of violent resistance: 'I was gripped by an urge to shoot them with a pistol and kill them, and in the situation of having no weapons I used mute words. I watched them from the sidelines and said to myself: This is our land, you dogs, this is our land and not your land. We will stay here to kill you. You will not win this battle.' (p 22) On July 14 he was expelled from his home with the rest of his family. He never returned to the city he loved. He never forgot the scenes of Lod in 1948, nor did he forget the idea of violent resistance. Can the Israeli leader understand how he felt?

"Now based in Beirut, he took part in terror operations against Jewish and Western targets in Beirut, Amman and Damascus: 'I personally lobbed grenades and I participated in assassination attempts. I had endless enthusiasm when I was doing that. At the time, I considered my life worthless relative to what was happening in Palestine.' 'The Palestinian Che Guevara' - both of them were doctors - made up his mind to wreak vengeance for the Nakba upon the West and the leaders of the Arab regimes that had abandoned his people, even before taking vengeance on the Jews. He even planned to assassinate King Abdullah of Jordan. He founded a new student organization in Beirut called the Commune, completed his specialization in pediatrics and wrote: 'I took the diploma and said: Congratulations, Mother, your son is a doctor, so now let me do what I really want to do. And indeed, that's what happened.' (p 41)

"Habash was once asked whether he was the Che Guevara of the middle East and replied that he would prefer to be the Mao Zedong of the Arab masses. He was the first to raise the banner of return and and in the meantime he opened clinics for Palestinian refugees in Amman. For him, the road back to Lod passed through Amman, Beirut and Damascus. The idea of Pan-Arabism stayed with him for many years, until he despaired of that as well. He also had to leave medicine: 'I am a pediatrician, I have enjoyed this greatly. I believed that I had the best job in the world but I had to make the decision I have taken and I don't regret it... A person cannot split his emotions in that way: to heal on the one hand and kill on the other. This is the time when he must say to himself: one or the other.'

"This book isn't arrogant and it isn't Orientalist; it is respectful of the Palestinian national ideology and those who articulated and lived it, even if the author doesn't necessarily agree with that ideology or identify with it. This is something quite rare in the Israeli landscape when it comes to Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular. Nor does the author venerate what's not worthy of veneration, and he doesn't have any erroneous romantic or other illusions. Galia presents a bitter, tough, uncompromising, very much failed and sometimes exceedingly cruel struggle for freedom, self-respect and liberation. And this is what is said in the founding document of the PFLP, which Habash established in December 1967 after having despaired of Palestinian unity: 'The only weapon left to the masses in order to restore history and progress and truly defeat enemies and potential enemies in the long run is revolutionary violence... The only language that the enemy understands is the language of revolutionary violence.' (p 125)

"But this path too met with failure. 'The essential aim of hijacking airplanes,' wrote Habash, 'was to bring the Palestinian question out of anonymity and expose it to Western public opinion, because at that time it was unknown in Europe and in the United States. We wanted to undertake actions that would make an impression on the senses of the entire world... There was international ignorance regarding our suffering, in part due to the Zionist movement's monopoly on the mass media in the West.' (p 151) The PFLP plane hijackings in the early 1970s indeed achieved international recognition of the existence of the Palestinian problem, but so far this recognition hasn't led anywhere. The only practical outcome has been the security screenings at airports everywhere around the world - and thank you, George Habash. I read Galia's book on a number of flights, even though this isn't an airplane book, and I kept thinking that were it not for Habash my wanderings at airports would have been a lot shorter. In my heart I forgave him for that, for what other path was open to him and his defeated, humiliated and bleeding people?

"Not much is left of his ideas. What has come of the scientific idealism and the politicization of the masses, the class struggle and the anti-imperialism, the Maoism and of course the transformation of the struggle against Israel into an armed struggle, which according to the plans was supposed to develop from guerrilla warfare into a national war of liberation? Fifty years after the founding of the PFLP and 10 years after the death of its founder, what remains? Habash's successor, Abu Ali Mustafa, was assassinated by Israel in 2001; his successor's successor, Ahmad Saadat, has been in an Israeli prison since 2006 and very little remains of the PFLP.

"During all my decades covering the Israeli occupation, the most impressive figures I met belonged to the PFLP, but now not much remains except fragments of dreams. The PFLP is a negligible minority in intra-Palestinian politics, a movement that once thought to demand equal power with Fatah and its leader, Arafat. And the occupation? It's strong and thriving and its end looks further off than ever. If that isn't failure, what is?

"Yet Habash always knew how to draw lessons from failure after failure. How resonant today is his conclusion following the Naksa, the defeat in 1967 that broke his spirit, to the effect that 'the enemy of the Palestinians is colonialism, capitalism and the global monopolies... This is the enemy that gave rise to the Zionist movement, made a covenant with it, nurtured it, protected it and accompanied it until it brought about the establishment of the aggressive and fascistic State of Israel.' (p 179) From the Palestinian perspective, not much has changed. It used to be that this was read in Israel as hostile and shallow propaganda. Today it could be read otherwise.

"After the failure of 1967, Habash redefined the goal: the establishment of a democratic state in Palestine in which Arabs and Jews would live as citizens with equal rights. Today this idea, too, sounds a bit less strange and threatening than it did when Habash articulated it.

"On the 40th anniversary of Israel's founding, Habash wrote that Israel was galloping toward the Greater Land of Israel and that the differences between the right and the left in the country were becoming meaningless. How right he was about that, too. At the same time, he acknowledged Israel's success and the failure of the Palestinian national movement. And he was right about that, too.

"And one last correct prophecy, though a bitter one, that he made in 1981: 'The combination of loss of lives and economic damage has considerable influence on Israeli society, and when that happens there will be a political, social and ideological schism on the Israeli street and in the Zionist establishment between the moderate side that demands withdrawal from the occupied territories and the extremist side that continues to cling to Talmudic ideas and dreams. Given the hostility between these two sides, the Zionist entity will experience a real internal split.' (p 329)

"This has yet to happen.

"Imad Saba, a dear friend who was active in the PFLP and is in exile in Europe, urged me for years to try to meet with Habash and interview him for Haaretz. As far as is known, Habash never met with Israelis, except during the days of the Nakba. Many years ago in Amman I interviewed Hawatmeh, Habash's partner at the start and the leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which split off from the PFLP in 1969. At the time of the interview, Habash was also living in Amman and was old and sick. I kept postponing my approach - until he died. When reading the book, I felt very sorry that I had not met this man."

Some of Us Lose Our House Keys...

The New York Times' Jerusalem Bureau Chief, Isabel Kershner, is one of a long line of Israeli/pro-Israeli propagandists (Thomas Friedman, Steven Erlanger, Ethan Bronner, Jodi Rudoren).

Our problem is that, in the absence of Fairfax having their own, half-way decent Middle East correspondent, Fairfax readers are expected to put up with the rubbish dished out by Kershner & Co. Either that, or similarly skewed reporting from The Washington Post.

Here, for example, is Kershner' outrageous euphemism for Israel's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians by Israeli terror gangs in 1948:

"The organisers said [the Great Return March] was intended to raise international awareness of the long-standing blockade of the isolated and impoverished coastal enclave, imposed by Israel and Egypt, and to support the Palestinian demand to return to homes lost in 1948, in what is now Israel." (Israel 'did what had to be done', New York Times/Sydney Morning Herald, 3/4/18)

Some of us may lose our house keys, but the Palestinians are apparently the only people in history to have lost their houses.

Every MSM Cliche in the Book

Wow, the following piece has almost every cliche in the pro-Israel MSM handbook: "violence" that merely "erupts" - just like that and for no apparent reason; that old standby "clashes"; Hamas puppet masters; Nakba euphemism*; reporter in direct touch with nameless "Hamas leaders" as he sips his lattes at Tel Aviv cafe; and those poor, put-upon Israeli soldiers who, typically, have no choice but to "respond" to ravening Palestinian untermenschen:

"A Palestinian mass protest along Gaza's border with Israel, billed as peaceful by its organisers, erupted in violence at the weekend, with at least 16 Palestinians killed and several hundred wounded in clashes with Israeli soldiers. Friday marked the beginning of six weeks of protests Hamas had planned against Israel and the Palestinian displacement surrounding its 1948 creation... Hamas leaders presented the initiative as a peaceful effort, though they readily conceded it might get out of hand. It did just that within hours, as demonstrators threw rocks and firebombs and rolled burning tires at Israeli soldiers, who responded with tear gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition." (Peaceful Gaza protest turns deadly, Jonathan Ferziger/Bloomberg, The Sun-Herald, 1/4/18)

Breathtaking!

[*And while we're at it, try this little Nakba euphemism on for size: "Demonstrators are campaigning for the right to go back to their ancestors' homes and land that was appropriated after Israel was founded 70 years ago." (Israel warns of raids to curb border unrest, The Sunday Times/The Australian, 2/4/18)]

Bob Carr Responds to Norrington:

"For the record, your feature article (Carr alarms pro-Israelis, 6/7) implies extreme language from me out of my recent speech making the case for recognition of Palestine and an end to the occupation.

"In my speech I was doing no more than advocating what every former head of Shin Bet and Mossad has advocated, although in more pungent language than mine. Paragraph 4 of the article has this dastardly Carr accusing Israel Israel of implementing a 'looting bill' and condoning 'war crimes'. Let's make it clear: this was Carr quoting Labor leader Isaac Herzog and Likud Knesset member Benny Begin. They were not Carr formulations. Two other Israeli prime ministers have used the word 'apartheid' - Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert. The assassinated Yitzhak Rabin is reported to have used the same language.

"'Massacres' in 1948 was a conclusion of Benny Morris, an Israeli historian, who detailed this from Israeli army archives. As I said in an op-ed published in The Australian on November 8, 2014, Morris's revelations were a tribute to openness in Israeli society. And I began my speech by paying tribute to Jews who opposed the occupation - a number in attendance at the meeting - and said they were the best allies of the cause for Palestinian recognition. It would have been nice if that had been included." (Letter to The Australian, 7/7/17)

The irony here is that "Benny Morris' revelations," far from being "a tribute to openness in Israeli society," as Carr says, reveal only the extreme pressure brought to bear on any academic who departs from the Zionist narrative. Rather than stand and defend his revelations, let alone draw universal moral conclusions from them, Benny Morris long ago effectively reverted to the role of a shill for Israel. (My May 2008 posts on the subject make for harrowing reading, Bob. Just click on the Benny Morris label below.)

In today's Australian, there's more from Norrington on how Carr has been instrumental in "rolling" the NSW ALP's foreign affairs committee [dominated by Mike Kelly MP], which had recently assured Bill Shorten that the current "soft language" of its Palestine/Israel policy - "committing Labor in government only to 'discussing' recognition [of Palestine] with like-minded nations if there was no progress in peace talks," would be retained at the upcoming NSW Labor Conference. This Carr has done by coming up with an alternative policy, resolution 23 on the party's agenda, reportedly agreed to by shadow foreign minister Penny Wong, Jason Clare MP, and state secretary Karla Murnain, which the foreign affairs committee has to accept. "Carr's supporters," says Norrington, "wanted an even stronger resolution, but accept the revised Murnain wording," which they are "confident the federal conference will adopt next year." (How Carr turned ALP from Israel to Palestine)

Oh, and an op-ed by ALP political has-been-turned-defender-of-Israel, Peter Baldwin, in which, despite Zionism's age-old stranglehold over the ALP, he contends that "the Labor Party risks becoming a vehicle for sectional interests."

Age Shall Not Weary Him

Nice to see that former foreign minister Bob Carr's advocacy on behalf of occupied Palestinians now includes a reference to the Nakba. Carr's remarks came in the context of a policy forum on Palestine hosted by Anthony Albanese and Tony Burke on 27/6/17:

"[Carr] says Palestinians had stories to tell that had been 'blotted out' until Israeli historian Danny [sic: Benny] Morris checked defence archives and found Palestinians were expelled when Israel was set up as a Jewish state in 1948. 'There were massacres,' Mr Carr says in his speech. 'And that feeds into the stories you're familiar with; of Palestinians having to flee their houses, leave their houses behind, and flee for the borders.' He says the people of Gaza are refugees with links not to that area but with the homes, real or imagined, inside Israel's borders of 1948. Mr Carr berates Israel's continued occupation of territories as a 'cruel' and 'hateful thing' that forces more suffering on Palestinian people." (Carr attacks Israel's 'foul' occupation, Brad Norington, The Australian,  5/7/17)

Bob Carr is yet another example of the phenomenon of the ex-politician who uses his retirement to inform himself and weigh in constructively on important issues such as Palestine/Israel. Malcolm Fraser was another such.

Gillard's Guru

On May 16, former Australian PM Julia Gillard (2010-13) received an honorary doctorate from Israel's Ben-Gurion University, an institution named after Israel's Ethnic Cleanser-in-Chief and first PM, David Ben-Gurion.

It was obvious from her acceptance speech, titled Reflections on a Life of Purpose, that Gillard had found in Ben-Gurion a real source of inspiration:

"I could think of no more fitting tribute to David Ben-Gurion than to have this place of learning and research bear his name," she cooed, noting that he "had one overriding attribute that defined him, his sense of purpose." (Former Aus PMs honoured in Israel, jewishnews.net.au, 18/5/17)

And she's right there, Ben-Gurion was nothing if not a man with a "sense of purpose."

Whether before the Nakba:

"We must expel Arabs and take their place." BG letter to his son, Amos, 5/10/37

During the Nakba:

"The war will give us the land. The concept 'ours' and 'not ours' are only concepts for peacetime, and during the war they lose all their meaning." BG quoted in Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of 'Transfer' in Zionist Political Thought 1882-1948, Nur Masalha, p 180

Or after the Nakba:

"The best solution for the [Palestinian] Arabs in Israel is to go and live in the Arab states - in the framework of a peace treaty or transfer." BG quoted in The Birth of Israel: Myths & Realities, Simha Flapan, p 99

... all this paragon of purpose, this demon of determination, could think of was how to grab as much of Palestine as possible, while getting rid of as many of its indigenous Arab inhabitants as possible.

A most interesting choice of guru this.

(For these and other quotes in the same vein by this most single-minded of men, go to Salman Abu Sitta's indispensable website, Palestine Remembered, and click on 'Famous Zionist Quotes/David Ben-Gurion'.)

Lifting the Lid on the Zionist Daleks of 1948

Let us recall Salman Abu Sitta's words to Uri Avnery about the Palestinian Nakba of 1948:

"Some would say of them [Holocaust survivors] that, if they were brave and not cowards, they would have fought the Nazis who pulled them out of their homes and killed them, not attack, at battalion-strength, a small village in faraway Palestine... and then butcher and expel its people. If they were brave and had a conscience, they would not call ethnic cleansing a 'war' of anything, let alone 'independence'." (See my 16/5/17 post You Can Run, But You Can't Hide 3)

Of course, nothing about this genocidal war against the Palestinian people ever makes its way into the Australian msm, even though Palestinians, both in exile and under occupation, mark it annually. It goes without saying that Nakba rallies in Melbourne and Sydney this year were scrupulously ignored by the msm.

Most curiously, however, the Sydney Morning Herald just happened to feature the year 1948 on its Timelines/Obituary page -  and, lo and behold, one of the three selections turned out to be, you guessed it, as follows:

"The Birth of Israel: The birth of the Jewish State of Israel had been proclaimed in a 'solemn assembly' of the Jewish National Council in Tel Aviv. 'The State would be open to all Jewish immigrants. It would develop the country for all inhabitants and would operate on the basis of precepts of liberty, justice and peace. it would uphold full social and political equality without distinction... and safeguard religious places of all religions." (1948: In the Herald, Brian Yatman, 16/5/17, p 31)

Perhaps Mr Yatman could explain the who, the what and the reason why.

Quite coincidentally, The Weekend Australian of 13-14 May referenced one of the Holocaust survivors alluded to by Abu Sitta above, although the context had nothing whatever to do with the Nakba. It appeared in an opinion piece on the anti-Semitism of the 19th century German composer Richard Wagner, written by the CEO of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, Vic Alhadaff, and read as follows:

"About to perform an encore in 1981, Zubin Mehta invited those who wish to do so to leave the hall and conducted an extract from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. Holocaust survivor Ben-Zion Leitner, who had fought in Israel's wars, strode to the front, exposed his battle scars and shouted 'Play Wagner over my body!" (Wagner's chorus of racial hatred)

And thereby hangs our tale, because, in the person of Mr Leitner, we have an example of the kind of individual (apart, of course, from Uri Avnery himself) that Abu Sitta had in mind when he penned his words.

To begin with, was Leitner a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp? Apparently not. His obituary at the Israeli Arutz Sheva website tells us that he was "a native of Odessa [who] fought with the partisans against Germany in World War II." (25/3/12)

As to to his military exploits in 1948 Palestine, Wikipedia informs us that he received Israel's "highest military decoration, the Hero of Israel citation for heroism during the War of Independence," specifically for leading "an assault that resulted in the blowing up of a bunker at a police position in [the Palestinian village of] Iraq Suweidan which resulted in half of his face becoming paralyzed."

At last, with the mention of the now obliterated Palestinian village of Iraq Suweidan (located in the Gaza district of southern Palestine), we draw closer to Leitner (and Avnery's) dark side, the substance of Abu Sitta's paragraph above, and a matter Alhadeff, as we have seen, nimbly glosses over.

The strategically important, British-built bunker/police station referred to had been heroically held by Egyptian troops against increasingly fierce Zionist attacks until their eventual surrender following the most sustained Zionist artillery barrage of the 1948 war. As for the village of Iraq Suweidan, which is estimated to have had a population of 766 at the time, we know almost nothing about the fate of its inhabitants. Obviously Ben-Zion Leitner's "battle scars" are more photogenic.

In his list of 6 causes for the "abandonment" of Palestinian villages in 1948, Israeli historian Benny Morris, in his 2004 book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, places Iraq Suweidan in category M - 'Military assault on settlement'.

To appreciate what this meant for the ethnically-cleansed villagers of Iraq Suweidan (and other Palestinian villagers in the area and throughout Palestine in 1948), and to ascertain more precisely what our "Hero of Israel" and his comrades got up to at the time, consider this passage from Morris' book:

"Giv'ati [Brigade] OC Shimon Avidan clearly intended to precipitate the flight of the Arab population of the area, bounded by Qazaza, Jilya, Idnibba and Mughallis in the east, Masmiya al Kabira and Qastina in the west, and Hatta and Beit 'Affa in the south. A preparatory order for the conquest of Masmiya al Kabira, Masmiya al Saghira, al-Tina, Qastina and Tal al Turmus was produced by Giv'ati's 51st Battalion during the First Truce, on 29 June. It spoke of the 'liquidation' (hisul) of the two Masmiya villages and conquering and 'cleansing' (bi'ur) the rest. On 5 July the brigade HQ discussed and outlined its plans for the 'Ten Days' [9-18 July] and two days later Avidan issued operational instructions. The order was to expedite 'the liquidation (hisul) of Arab villages in this area'. The 51st Battalion was ordered to take the large village of Tel as Safi and 'to destroy the enemy's fighting force and... to destroy, to kill and to expel (lehashmid, laharog u'legaresh) refugees encamped in the area, in order to prevent enemy infiltration from the east to this important position'. The nature of the written order and, presumably, the accompanying oral explanations, probably left little doubt in the battalion OC's minds that Avidan wanted the area cleared of inhabitants.

"Operation An-Far was unleashed on the night of 8-9 July, hours after the Egyptians broke the First Truce.  The area covered by Avidan's order was overrun during 8-11 July, with most of the population fleeing before the IDF columns reached each village. Tel as Safi was captured in the early morning hours of 9 July. Laying down a barrage of mortar and machine-gun fire, the 51st Battalion approached from the north and west. After taking the tel itself, the IDF fired on the houses down the slope 'increasing the mass flight, which was accompanied by screams of fear... ' According to the official IDF historian, the fall of this key village caused the mass flight of more than 10,000 Arabs from the area who saw themselves cut off... 'from Egyptian and irregular Arab forces to the east and south.' Beit 'Affa, 'Ibdis, Tall al Turmus and the village of Iraq Suwaydan all fell on 8-9 July, the villagers fleeing as IDF troops approached or attacked; local rumour had it that the Israeli troops had dealt with the inhabitants of Beit 'Affa 'as they had dealt with Deir Yassin'. The village of Karatiya was harassed by machine-gun fire and abandoned by its inhabitants. During 12-15 July, Giv'ati units raided and harassed a number of other villages, including 'Ajjur, Deir al Dubban, and Summeil, and conquered Bi'lin and Barqusya, which were both found empty. The last two were put to the torch, 'to the extent possible'. Reporting on these operations, the brigade's 'Combat Page', penned by the vengeful poet Abba Kovner, a former anti-Nazi partisan and Hashomer Hatza'ir stalwart, declared: 'Suddenly the ground was soft [under the wheels of the jeeps of Samson's Foxes', Giv'ati's commando unit] - bodies! Tens of bodies under their wheels. The driver was put off: human beings under his wheels! [But] wait a minute. He remembered [Kibbutz] Negba [and] Beit Daras [in both Arab troops had killed Jews] - and he ran them over! Do not be deterred, sons: murderous dogs - their punishment is blood! And the more you run over bloody dogs, the more you will love the beautiful, the good, and liberty'." (pp 436-37)

Avnery, I should point out, was a squadron commander in the Giv'ati Brigade, and later, in the Samson's Foxes commando unit.

You Can Run, But You Can't Hide 4

No reply from Uri. A renewed note from Salman to Uri, 27/1/17:

Dear Uri,

Reading your weekly article has become a ritual for me. It is full of knowledge and appreciation of facts and understanding of the lessons of history. In all matters and about all countries. Except Palestine.

You did not respond to my last letter. Perhaps you thought it too strong and harsh. But it was true. Sometimes truth cannot be answered.

You did not read my book or did not wish to comment. That is not a problem.

Europeans of Jewish faith gave Europe a lot of culture, philosophy, science and ideals of liberation. That was not because they read the Torah daily, but because they were the product of European 'civilisation'. Einstein, Lenin, and Marx did that, and the world should be grateful to them as decent human beings.

Those Europeans, Ashkenazim, aka Israelis, when they descended on Palestine, acted against every humanitarian principle they espoused when they were in Europe. They smashed children's brains out (Dawayima), bayoneted pregnant women's stomachs (Dayr Yassin), burnt old men alive (Lajjun), shot farmers in ditches they were forced to dig as graves (Tantoura), threw them in a well (Sa'sa and Ayn Zeitoun), set a village ablaze and threw hand grenades at people inside their homes (Bureir).

Above all, they depopulated 600 Palestinian localities, the worst event in Palestine's 5000-year history.

They were terrorists of the worst kind. Those who should have known better did these awful things.

You belonged to the Irgun, the 'worst' terrorist group, if grading can be made.

I know that you have spent years calling for 'peace'. But your peace means that the killer should be forgiven, the thief should get away with the stolen goods, and those expelled from their homes should be thrown a few pieces of silver to shut up.

No remorse, no repentance, no justice, no remedy. Just empty words.

How could those settlers live with this double life, liberty in Europe and crime in Palestine?

The answer is schizophrenia. The European Jews, aka Israelis, live in a bubble of denial. A fake world. They shut the world of crime out of their minds and the minds of the adoring West. And preach peace, democracy, science and art instead.

No Nakba. Perish the thought. No word 'Palestinian'. No flag. Oh yes. There are no refugees. Just Arabs who drifted from Arabia Deserta into the land of milk and honey, created by European settlers who came to this empty desert land and made it a paradise.

They are cowards. I say this again.

Some years ago, my nephew, now a professor in Berlin, visited my birthplace, al- Ma'in, with his uncle, showing him the places he knew. My nephew told me this story. While they were walking around, an older settler with a little girl came by in a car and asked: 'Where are you from?' The uncle said: 'From here', and pointed to the land. The settler said: 'Then you are Abu Sitta?'

His teenage daughter, or granddaughter, was curious, leaned over, looked at them, and asked her grandfather: 'Who are they?'

He pushed her away and drove off fast. The little girl must have discovered the fraud in the old man's tale. He did not have the courage to explain. He hid in his bubble.

How long will this last? The bubble will burst one day.

Will the European Jews ever mend their ways? Was their preaching in the Age of the Enlightenment just a big hoax?

Time will tell. At a price.

Salman

No reply from Uri again. From Salman to Uri, 18/2/17:

Dear Uri,

I realise you do not want to reply to my letters. They are either too painful or cannot be rebutted. Certainly, they are not irrelevant.

I keep writing to you since we met in Paris over a decade ago because I think you have unique characteristics.

You have been a terrorist. You witnessed the Nakba, so you cannot deny it. You tried to forge peace with Palestinians, but only on Zionist terms. You have a grasp of all the facts, so you cannot claim that you did not know.

So why are you still in a denial bubble?

So it, loud and clear: the Nakba was the near-complete ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Israel is a colonial project, and its umbilical cord is the colonial powers. God-given, or empty, uninhabited, Palestine is hogwash.

Say it. Say it as a last minute CONFESSION. It purifies the soul, and perfumes the memory.

I am waiting. Because I have hope in human redemption.

Salman

From Uri to Salman, 18/2/17:

Alas, the story is much more complicated.

All the best,

Uri

You Can Run, But You Can't Hide 3

More Israelis say NO...

Two years later after miscellaneous correspondence, from Salman to Uri, 10/6/16:

Dear Uri,

Just finished reading you article today (Friday, 10/6/16). I am amazed at how many stories, anecdotes, religious, historical and personal references and insights you marshal in your writings, particularly this one, on Tin disguised as Gold. A wealth of knowledge, I printed it.

You certainly do not live in the Israeli bubble of denial like those who committed the crimes of the Nakba and refuse to talk about them, or even close the archives describing them. You obviously do not belong to the present generation who do not know that these crimes have happened because nobody told them. It is taboo. Israelis live in a drugged world. But you do not. You could not.

Which begs the question: why do you not, then, publicly support the natural right of Palestinians, the natural inhabitants of Palestine, to live freely in their homes?

I do not give a hoot about the two-state solution or the umpteenth-state solution. State recognition is a political act which can be revoked, expanded or cancelled. Look at Europe, or the legacy of Sykes-Picot. Look at Israel. It exists by virtue of political recognition, mostly Western, not by international law.

But Human Rights are fundamental, permanent, non-negotiable - unless humanity is for sale or bartering.

On which side are you?

Best regards,

Salman

PS Did you receive your copy of my book, Mapping the Return?

From Uri to Salman, 11/6/16:

Dear Salman,

Good to hear from you.

I have not yet seen your new book. Am very interested.

Israelis at large do not want Israel proper to turn into an Arab-majority country. They have toiled for five generations to create a Hebrew-speaking country. This is a fact of life, so the other vision can only be achieved by a bloody war. This may change in a few generations, though I doubt it.

So those who want peace have to look for another solution, probably a complicated one, in the framework of the two states plan.

All the very best,

Uri

From Salman to Uri, 30/9/16:

As usual, your article on Peres last week and Abu Mazen this week are spot on. At least from your perspective, which is widely accepted.

I had a debate at Tokyo University in September 2013 with the late Ron Pundak on Oslo, and I said that the Abbas government is a Vichy government. He was upset, not because Abbas was not Petain but because Israel was not Nazi Germany. I pointed out that in 1941 the Nazis signed the 'Paris Economic Protocol' with Vichy for the same purpose (and name) that Israel signed fifty years later with Abu Alaa - who now says Oslo was a huge disaster.

I am not going to ask you if you have read my book. The first edition has sold out, and a paperback edition is due in November. It was reviewed a dozen times, including by the Guardian. It describes my uprooting from my village, Al-Ma'in (60,000 dunums), on which is now perched Nirim, Nir Oz, Ein Hashlosha and Magen Kibbutzim. My extended family is now 10,000, mostly living in refugee camps 2 km away, not once forgetting their right to return. Nirim lies on my father's land, with 174 kibbutz members plus their children.

I have a suggestion, a mere suggestion. Could you contact these four kibbutzim and ask them if they know how they got there in 1948, and if they know that the owners of the land they occupy still insist on returning there? And whether the answer is yes or no, what are you going to do about it?

I know that their existence is precarious, hanging by a thread (the gun). That is why they hide in their bubble of denial, afraid to face the fact. Is there any one of them brave enough to shout out and say, We were wrong?

Some would say of them that if they were brave and not cowards, they would have fought the Nazis who pulled them out of their homes and killed them, not attack, at battalion-strength, a small village in far-away Palestine, armed with a dozen rusty rifles, and then butcher and expel its people. If they were brave and had a conscience, they would not call ethnic cleansing a 'war' of anything, let alone 'independence'.

Could you act on my suggestion?

I hope so.

Salman

TBC...