Avnery Takes Us For a Ride

In support of the contention that age doesn't automatically confer wisdom, I offer the following reflection by birthday boy, Uri Avnery:

"The Arabs were here before we arrived... I still believe that the early Zionists made a terrible mistake when they did not try to combine their aspirations with the hopes of the Palestinian population. Realpolitik told them to embrace their Turkish oppressors instead. Sad. The best description of the conflict was given by the historian Isaac Deutscher: a man lives in an upper floor of a house that catches fire. In desperation the man jumps out of the window and lands on a passerby down below, who is grievously injured and becomes an invalid. Between the two, there erupts a deadly conflict. Who is right?" (A confession: Uri Avnery turns 93, antiwar.com, 8/9/17)

The first 3 sentences indicate either that Avnery has no real understanding of the settler-colonial nature of the Zionist movement or, more likely, is merely having a lend of us. Beyond sad.

Given its settler-colonial nature, at no stage in its history could the Zionist movement have given any serious thought to "combining their aspirations with the hopes of the Palestinian population."

Just to drive home the point, let me quote from an early Zionist document which a reader of this blog kindly referred me to recently. The author of Our Program, Menachem Ussishkin, Secretary of the First Zionist Congress (1897) and head of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) from 1923 until 1941, wrote in 1904:

"In order to create... a Jewish state in Palestine, it is above all necessary that the whole soil of Palestine... should be in the possession of Jews... But how is land obtained in any country? Only in one of the following three ways: by force, that is, by depriving the possessor of his property by violent means; by forced sale, that is, by expropriation (the taking of private property for public purposes) by the state; or by voluntary sale. Which of these three means is applicable in Palestine? The first is entirely excluded. For that we are too weak... "

Not excluded, mind you, because it was morally repugnant, but excluded because the Zionist movement had yet to take up arms and ethnically cleanse Palestine. Ussishkin, btw, would go on, in 1936, to advocate that the Palestinian Arabs be transferred to Iraq.

As for Avnery's "best description of the conflict [with the Palestinians]," Deutscher's fable of the falling man, see Christopher Hitchens' demolition job on that, quoted in my 27/2/14 post George Brandis, 'Hitch 22' and Some Burning Questions.

The Australian Reviews John Lyons

John Lyon's invaluable book, Balcony Over Jerusalem, was reviewed in today's Australian by one of its journalists, David Leser.

Unfortunately, Leser's seemingly irresistible urge to defend the indefensible - apartheid Israel - and indulge in special pleading for Palestine's colonisers and occupiers tells us far more about Leser than it does about Lyons' book.

Here we go then:

"... the Middle East is a hellishly complex place. Every aspect of history is contested. Every word is loaded."

Quite why Leser feels he has to reference the entire Middle East when dealing specifically with Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories is anyone's guess. But I simply don't understand how he can seriously talk about contested history and loaded words without reference to the following passage which he earlier quotes from Lyons' book: "If the whole world could see the occupation up close, it would demand that it end tomorrow. Israel's treatment of the Palestinians would not pass muster in the West if the full details were known. The only reason Israel is getting away with this is because it has one of the most formidable public-relations machines ever seen..."

Without Israel's vast propaganda apparatus there'd be neither contestation nor loading.

"I've argued with family members over this issue, and lost Jewish friends in the process - all because I believe, like Lyons, that the occupation is a moral stain on both the Jewish State and the Jewish soul."

I don't get it. Why the arguments? Occupied river-to-sea Palestine belongs to neither Leser nor his family. Neither he nor his family nor his Jewish friends have a right to one centimetre of Palestinian soil. And not only is the occupation he refers to "a moral stain," the very existence of a "Jewish State" on Palestinian Arab land is a moral stain on all who conceived it, created it, and, today, continue to support it.

"My concern is that for all the rush of understandable anger [Lyons] directs at Israel, his book is mostly devoid of sympathy for the multiple internal problems and frailties that Israelis face, not to mention the wild diversity of the country's immigrant survivor population."

Does Leser seriously expect Lyons (or anyone else), who has, in Lyons' words, seen the occupation "up close," to sympathise with its perpetrators? Has Leser, in his 40-year-old career as a journalist, ever once felt sympathy for the people of any other occupying power? And, seriously, where is the "wild diversity" in a Jewish state?

"Throughout history Jews have been despised, displaced, vilified, persecuted and, ultimately exterminated for the fact of their Jewishness, and they have carried their collective trauma - this epigenetic inheritance - into a murderous neighbourhood where they are both a minority and majority at the same time. A tiny minority among hundreds of millions of (mostly) Arabs and a majority when it comes to the Palestinians."

And the Palestinian Arabs are responsible for that? Historical anti-Semitism in Europe trumps the right of Palestinians to their Palestinian homeland? What kind of sick morality is that? And who funneled European Jews into said "murderous neighbourhood"? I'll tell you who - the murderous Zionist movement, motivated by one hell of a murderous idea: Jews in, Palestinians out.

"That, along with countless wars and acts of terrorism over the past 70 years, is what has driven the psychopathology of victimhood and its inevitable - and terrible - consequence: oppression."

Yes, countless wars... initiated by the Israeli army. And countless acts of terrorism... initiated by the Israeli army and its pre-state predecessors, the Haganah, the Irgun and the Stern Gang.

But the biggest deception here is Leser's omission of any reference to the Zionist movement. The dark truth is that Israel is the product of a settler-colonial movement, riding roughshod, as these movements do, over the rights of the natives, not some pitiable creature whose past was so traumatic that it just can't help using the Palestinians as a collective punching bag.

The Real Boycotters

"Senior writer" at the Australian, Sharri Markson, reported yesterday that "A director of activist group GetUp! supports a boycott of Israeli products and wants to 'force Israel into a perennial state of existential anxiety'." (GetUp! director fighting Israel)

My first impulse on reading this, of course, was to proceed forthwith to a public place, mount a soapbox, and proclaim to all and sundry: 'How dare GetUp! force poor Israel into a perennial state of existential anxiety! Perennial FFS, isn't that, like, forever?'

Then I remembered the words of the great Palestinian historian (1910-1981) A.L. Tibawi on the period leading up to WWI, when control over Palestine was still just a steely gleam in Zionist eyes. If Ms Markson really wants to know what boycotting people and plunging them into a perennial state of existential anxiety is all about, she should read Tibawi:

"The Zionist objectives, both immediate and distant, were... well-known to the Arabs in Palestine and the neighbouring countries. In the spring of 1914 a Russian member of the Zionist Executive, Nahum Sokolow, complained in an interview with the Palestine correspondent of the Cairo newspaper al-Muqattam that the Palestinian and Syrian Arab hostility to Zionism was unjustified. The Arabs and the Jews were two branches of the Semitic tree; they co-operated in the fields of science and learning especially in Spain and contributed together to the European renaissance; the Jews were returning to their ancient homeland from which they were expelled by the Romans and the Crusaders; they bring with them the means of developing the country; they wish to come close to Arab civilisation and cooperate with the Arabs for the creation of a new Palestinian civilisation; they wish to revive their Hebrew language and establish their own schools in which the Arabic language and history would be taught.

"Sokolow was tackled by Rafiq al-Azm, the well-known Syrian historical writer and member of the Decentralisation Party. He agreed that as two Semitic cousins the Arabs and Jews ought to cooperate in reviving the glory of the Semitic civilisation, that Palestine with the rest of Syria required development, and that Jewish immigrants, coming from a more civilised environment, possessed skills that could be employed for the benefit of the country. But he regretted to see no evidence in Palestine that Jewish immigrants wished to unite with the Arabs in an effort to raise the standards of all its inhabitants, or that they wished to come close to the Arabs in any way. In fact they lived in complete isolation: they speak only their own languages; their children attend only their own schools; all their business is with Jewish firms; they organise a separate economy and they ignore local government and its laws; and above all they stubbornly refuse to abandon their foreign nationality and adopt the Ottoman.

"They must not be surprised if for these reasons the Arabs regard them as an alien people, and a foreign element interjected into their society. And this is the root cause of Arab apprehension regarding their economic and political future. For the present they feared and suffered from the competition of immigrants coming from more civilised environments. For the future they saw the political implications and feared for the eventual loss of their homeland.

"Sokolow's words were belied by these facts. If the Jews continued to lead a separate life in Palestine and to labour only for their own benefit, they must expect Arab hostility. 'To-day', the writer warns, 'the Syrian public opinion is unanimous in opposing Zionism.' The opposition in Palestine itself was led by young and educated men. News had just been received in Cairo that they sent telegrams of protest to Constantinople pointing out the dangers of Zionism and criticising the conduct of the Zionists in Palestine.

"It is clear that the writer had contact with unnamed Zionist leaders. 'We advised them', he writes, 'to cooperate with the Arabs for the benefit of a common homeland as native Syrians, not as foreigners waiting for an opportunity to take it for themselves...' He states that among the measures he recommended was not only the teaching of Arabic in Jewish schools but their opening to Arab children so that Arab and Jew could learn to live together. He also recommended that the Jews should share with the Arabs their business and mix with them socially. They should help the less experienced Arabs to learn modern methods. Above all he recommended the adoption of Ottoman nationality. But, he concludes, all that advice fell on deaf ears." (Anglo-Arab Relations & the Question of Palestine 1914-1921, 1978, pp 21-22)

And is still falling on deaf ears.

Zionism's Giant Jewish Caliphate of 1919

Emma Meconi is a relatively recent addition to The Australian's stable of opinion writers.

Billing herself as a Greens voter, her latest piece begins thus:

"As a Greens supporter I am generally opposed to war and strongly objected to the military engagement in Iraq that began a decade ago. But this time the circumstances have changed and the threat to human life has escalated. Careful consideration is required of the new facts and an appropriate response must be implemented quickly. I believe Tony Abbott has made the right call to support military intervention in Iraq." (Islamic State's evil onslaught demands a military response, 20/9/14)

Surprise, surprise, Meconi even goes on to argue for "a new military engagement" in  Syria.

She concludes her piece as follows:

"War will be effectively a restoration process, cleaning away the rot and enabling a thorough rebuilding process to take place in affected areas."  (ibid)

A Greens supporter? Right...

It was the following sentence though that really caught my attention:

"The Islamic State... seeks to establish a giant caliphate in the Middle East and recruit believers globally to make their delusions a reality." (ibid)

It got me thinking about the Middle East's original sectarian entity, the Jewish State, the Zionist movement which spawned it, and the Zionist leadership's delusions of grandeur, evidenced in their post-World War 1 bid for a far larger Jewish caliphate than the one we find ourselves with today.

The following reference to the giant caliphate of Zionist dreaming and scheming circa 1919 comes from one of the best current histories of the Palestine problem, Adel Safty's Might Over Right: How the Zionists Took Over Palestine (2009):

"Chaim Weizmann summed up both the Zionist demands and the strategy at the [Paris] Peace Conference in the following way: the Zionists' demands were that 'the whole administration of Palestine shall be so formed as to make of Palestine a Jewish Commonwealth under British trusteeship, and that the Jews shall so participate in the administration as to secure this object'. Furthermore, 'The Jewish population is to be allowed the widest practicable measure of self-government and to have extensive powers of expropriating the owners of the soil.' The Zionist delegation proposed boundaries for the Jewish Commonwealth, which included parts of Lebanon, Syria, the whole of Transjordan and most of the Egyptian Sinai.

"The Zionists wanted considerably more territories than British Prime Minister Lloyd George's biblical formula 'from Dan to Beersheba' suggested. It had been on the basis of Lloyd George's biblical notion about Palestine that boundaries were proposed for the Jewish National Home. Foreign Office aides used Sir George Adam Smith's atlas of Palestine in the time of David and Solomon circa 1,000 BC as the basis for, as a British historian put it, 'the geographical, the physical, and the political obliteration of the Arabs who now inhabited that area nearly three thousand years later. There was a very awkward moment during this surely utterly fantastic scene in Paris, when [French leader] Clemenceau asked Lloyd George to show him where Dan was on the map - and Lloyd George was unable to'." (41-2)

The SMH: Ignorant. Always.

What a useless, sodding rag the Sydney Morning Herald is.

At least when you read the Murdoch press you know what you're getting: unqualified, knee-jerk support for Israel, with lashings of Islamophobia. It comes with the territory.

But isn't Fairfax supposed to be different? Something other than a mere conduit for the Zionist talking point of the day, which involves conflating Islamic State and Hamas? Isn't it, as it boasts on its masthead, 'Independent. Always.'? Apparently not.

The Herald's editorial of August 27, Muslims are allies in fight against terrorism, begins thus:

"The world now has proliferating self-declared caliphates, or Islamic states. In Nigeria Boko Haram militants who have murdered thousands since 2009, declared a caliphate in the north-east of the country. [Its leader] praised the leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, who has declared a caliphate across parts of Syria and Iraq. In Yemen, an affiliate of al-Qaeda has announced it will declare a caliphate in territory it controls... There has been pitiless violence in the past week involving groups which invoke Islam to justify their violence... In Gaza, Hamas executed 20 Palestinians who it claimed had been collaborators with Israel..."

This, mind you, from a paper that has had SFA to say editorially about the pitiless 5 weeks of carnage and devastation wrought by the forces of the Jewish caliphate of Israel on the largely defenceless population of the Gaza Strip.

By witlessly (?) conflating the Palestinian resistance with lunatic, sectarian outfits such as Boko Haram, Islamic State and the rest, the Herald is simply acting as another Israeli propaganda outlet. And this so soon after the relentless hounding it was subjected to by the Zionist Murdoch press over the fearless commentary of columnist Mike Carlton and cartoonist Glen Le Lievre on Israeli genocide in Gaza.

As for Hamas' execution of collaborators, it need only be asked: what resistance organisation in history has not done this?

Offing collaborators was in fact an integral part of the Zionist movement's modus operandi in the 1940s.

Here for example is an extract from the Wikipedia entry for Lehi aka the Stern Gang:

"According to a compilation by Nachman Ben-Yehuda*,Lehi was responsible for 42 assassinations, more than twice as many as the Irgun and Hagana combined during the same period. Of those Lehi assassinations that Ben-Yehuda classified as political, more than half the victims were Jews."

And here's the testimony of a former Lehi operative, Maxim Ghilan:

"There ensued a period of confusion, not devoid of internecine fights and back-stabbing. The fear of agents and CID provocations took its bitter toll in men and mood. The renascent band of underground fighters had to become more secretive, more ruthless, more close-knit, in order to survive. More than one innocent paid for this state of affairs with his life. After a while things sorted themselves out. A shadow started spreading over Palestine - the shadow of a company of men prepared to do anything to bring about the creation of the State of Israel and the end of the Mandate. And anything - or everything - they did. They killed civilians, they kidnapped enemies, they executed traitors, they laid bombs, they assassinated the British Commissioner for the Middle East, Lord Moyne, in Cairo." (How Israel Lost Its Soul, 1974, p 100)

[*Political Assassinations by Jews: A Rhetorical Device for Justice (1993), p 397]

The Native Police

Zionist propagandists today (it wasn't always the case) just hate being described as settler-colonialists.

They prefer to paint themselves as an indigenous 'people' or 'nation', who, having been evicted from their Palestinian homeland by the Romans nigh on 2000 years ago, just sat around moping until, under the banner of political Zionism, they were able to 'return'.

OK, it's a great yarn, but sadly, that's all it is.

As much as Zionists like to pretend that theirs is a movement for national self-determination, rather than its opposite, just another, albeit highly creative, white European colonizing movement, there are simply too many tell-tale signs for the settler-colonial reality to be glossed over.

Like this, for example:

"Known popularly as the Magav, the Israeli Border Police evolved in part from an army division created in the wake of the state's foundation for the explicit purpose of capturing and deporting Palestinian refugees who had slipped into their former villages to reunite with family and spouses. Named the Minorities Unit, the division was comprised mostly of deeply impoverished young men recruited from Druze villages in the north and Bedouin Arab enclaves in the south. Their recruitment of non-Palestinian Arab subgroups served David Ben Gurion's divide-and-conquer strategy, which he dubbed, 'fragmentation'. As one Israeli official said, the Minorities Unit formed 'the sharp blade of a knife to stab in the back of Arab unity'." (Goliath: Life & Loathing in Greater Israel, Max Blumenthal, 2013, p 255)

And here's the same phenomenon closer to home:

"The frontier violence inflicted upon Aboriginal people in Queensland was a refinement of practices in southern colonies and a tradition of violence migrated north with landseekers. Colonialism is inherently violent. Moreover, the concept of using Indigenous troops to further colonisation and suppress resistance was not new. Like the British, other conquerors had found that Native forces enjoyed a number of advantages as imperial soldiers and frontier guards. Indigenous people were familiar with local terrain, customs and languages, and they had an ability to survive off the land without the catastrophic medical problems that affected invading armies and expeditions... By the time the British colonised Australia, several practices were standard. The Native Police, like other armed colonial formations based on the use of Indigenous recruits, took advantage of the fact that Native people had no loyalties to other Indigenous groups. Indeed, in some cases they were sworn enemies, and fought as much in their own self-interest as for other reasons. It has been argued that the search for a Native power base is an essential step in many colonial annexations. The concept of divide and rule, implicit in the recruitment of Indigenous troopers, shows how the British had learned to adapt traditional Indigenous enmity to their advantage." (The Secret War: A True History of Queensland's Native Police, Jonathan Richards, 2008, p 10)

Same old, same old.

The Unpalatable Truth About Martha Gellhorn 6

"I know now that there are things for which I am prepared to die. I am willing to die for political freedom; for the right to give my loyalty to ideals above a nation and above a class; for the right to teach my child what I think to be the truth; for the right to explore such knowledge as my brains can penetrate; for the right to love where my mind and heart admire, without reference to some dictator's code to tell me what the national canons on the matter are; for the right to work with others of like mind; for a society that seems to me becoming to the dignity of the human race."

Dorothy Thompson, 1937

 "What then should we be? That each will answer for himself. But for myself I say: Though stripped of every armor, be a warrior - a warrior of the spirit, for what the spirit knows."

Dorothy Thompson, 1955

***

And so to my concluding post on this subject. I began with the question: Isn't it time to rename The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism? Needless to say, I believe it is.

Also needless to say, I base my case on the fact that Martha Gellhorn failed, and miserably so, the pre-eminent litmus test for journalistic integrity in our time, namely, Palestine or Israel - which side are you on?

So what to call it then? Keeping in mind that the prize is awarded to "journalists whose work has penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth," I'd be inclined to name it (if not after my all-time favourite choice, J.M.N. Jeffries) after the great American journalist Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961).

Dorothy who? I hear you all chorus. Unfortunately, for most of us today, Dorothy Thompson's is a long forgotten name. That wasn't the case, however, in her heyday. For a background sketch, try this from the dust jacket of Peter Kurth's invaluable 1990 biography, American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson:

"For 3 decades, amid the sweeping events of the first half of the twentieth century, no journalist was more controversial, more opinionated, more irreverent, or more quoted than Dorothy Thompson. At the pinnacle of her career, Thompson's thrice-weekly news column, 'On the Record' - one of the longest running news columns ever - reached millions of people around the globe. She was heard by millions more in her regular radio broadcasts. She was satirized by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year, and in 1939, in a Time magazine cover story, was called the most influential woman in America next to Eleanor Roosevelt."

For most of her life, Dorothy Thompson was, in fact, an uncritical supporter of the Zionist movement, largely because, like so many other Western intellectuals of the time, she was focused more on the struggle against fascism in Europe, including the appalling resurgence of state-sponsored anti-Semitism under the Nazis in pre-war Germany, than on the crimes of British imperialism in faraway Palestine or elsewhere.

Writes Peter Kurth:

"[S]he had been, up through the end of World War II, one of Zionism's most profoundly moving spokesmen. In May of 1942 she had appeared as a keynote speaker at the Biltmore Hotel in New York, where an international conference had been called to agitate for unrestricted Jewish immigration to Palestine. There is no question that Dorothy, up to that point, was wholeheartedly sympathetic to the Zionist movement and convinced (as later she was not) that the Jews were 'a separate people'... that needed to be dealt with as such after twenty centuries of persecution and oppression. 'The whole anti-Semitic movement is full of fetish and black magic,' Dorothy had written in 1943. 'It is a kind of modern witchcraft. Back of this black magic is the fact that the Jews do lead an abnormal life. They are a cohesive people without a place on earth of their own. That fact gives them, in the superstitious mind, an atmosphere of doom. An atmosphere of doom produces an atmosphere of fear.' And a state of their own, 'built by themselves and expressing their own peculiar culture and way of life,' might liberate the Jews from their status as outsiders. It would end the 'ghost story' of the Diaspora. It would allow any Jew, anywhere in the world, to make a choice: to become a member of the Jewish state, or to surrender his Jewishness (as distinct from his religious practice) once and for all to the country of his birth.

"Indeed, it was with an eye to the assimilation of the Jews that Dorothy had first thrown her support behind political Zionism. She had been assured 'time and again' (and for the first time in London, in 1920, during the Zionist conference that launched her career) that the Jewish state in Palestine would encompass 'in equal partnership' the indigenous population of the region, and that 'actively dissident Arabs,' if there were any, could be transferred 'to other parts of the vast Pan-Arab Empire, which covers a territory as large as large as the United States.' Ignorant of Arab culture, badly informed about the history of the Middle East, Dorothy had not then imagined that a Palestinian shepherd would care very much whether he drew water from a well in Bethlehem or in Fez. Later she would deeply regret the cultural and racial prejudice that had allowed her to regard 'the Arabs' as interchangeable bodies, indistinguishable one from another and superfluous in the face of Western plans, but even at the height of her devotion to Zionism she never suspected that whole populations (nearly a million people, by most estimates) would be uprooted from their homes in Palestine and driven into exile.

"'I should be opposed to it if I were a Jew,' Dorothy had warned, 'with the undimmed memory of the dispersion of my own people in mind. I should not want any Arab to sit beside the waters of Babylon and weep because he remembered Zion.' Her first trip to Palestine in 1945 had convinced her that Zionism was not the 'liberal crusade' she had thought it to be, 'that the Zionist leaders envisaged,' as she put it, 'not a small state of Jews who chose to live in Israel, but a Zionist state destined to become the leading power in the Middle East, as the ward of world Jewry whatever their citizenship in other countries [might be].' Dorothy was very much upset by Jewish terrorism in the quest for statehood. She was 'shocked beyond measure' when Menachem Begin, one of the leaders of the Irgun group that was responsible for the massacre of more than 250 Arabs at Deir Yassin, was accorded a hero's welcome by the Jews of New York, and when Ben Hecht, Peter Bergson, and other leading Zionists 'put on a show in Madison Square Garden' and 'slandered Great Britain' by displaying the Union Jack topped with the Nazi swastika. The failure of Israel, after 1948, to agree to the fixing of its borders, to heed the call for the internationalization of Jerusalem, or to provide any relief or compensation for the Palestinian refugees led Dorothy to conclude that Zionism was 'an aggressive, chauvinistic movement' and that the State of Israel was 'an expansionist power' - 'a creation of the United Nations decision made against the opposition of the whole Arab and Moslem world.'

"Ultimately Dorothy was more worried about the effect of Israeli propaganda on American foreign policy than she was about the righteousness or iniquity of Israel itself... She was ahead of most of her colleagues in journalism in considering the problem of Israel at all (beyond merely hailing its creation as a humanitarian enterprise or, like Walter Lippmann, arguing that the Western allies ought to 'impose peace' on the Middle East through the establishment of a joint Israeli-Palestinian confederation). But just as Dorothy was one of the first - and only - American journalists to speak out in defense of the Arab nations, so was she the first and most prominent American journalist to be smeared with the label of 'anti-semite'." (pp 423-425)

I'll finish specifically on the issue of the Palestinian Arab refugees of 1948, the ones so venomously slandered by Gellhorn. As it happens, the first ever documentary film in English on the subject of those refugees, Sands of Sorrow (1950), produced by the Council for Relief of Palestine Arab Refugees, was introduced and closed by Dorothy Thompson. Here is her moving introduction:

"I'm Dorothy Thompson and I have been asked to introduce Sands of Sorrow because I've recently returned from visiting the scenes of the picture you are about to see. Of course, the impression left on my mind by these wretched casualties of political change is much more distressing than the film. For no film can convey the icy winds from Mt Hermon as they blow upon flimsy, floorless tents in Syria or the rains that turn dwellings into mud holes in the rainy season in Lebanon. Nor the defeated feeling even of those who are trying to help, but this film tells part of the story that, until now, has hardly been told at all outside the Arab world."

This is light years away from the propagandist bile of Martha Gellhorn.

Re the name change, I rest my case.

Original Tat

"[I]n Palestine it is not consequences but causes which cry out for examination. The causes, which have been kept concealed or as far out of sight as possible, all are to be sought within the period from the [First World] War to 1923." (JMN Jeffries, Palestine: The Reality, 1939, p 574)

As the ms media frame it, Palestine/Israel is primarily a matter of tit-for-tat, a term which invariably crops up with each new round of Israeli savagery in the Gaza Strip, the latest included. The repetition of this term, with its historically contextless perspective, tends to deter the casual reader/viewer from a consideration or examination of the underlying causes of the problem, causes which cannot be lost sight of if one is to truly understand the problem and envisage a just and peaceful solution for it.

With this in mind, I have found it useful to consult those who were there at the time to witness the original tat, if I may call it that, namely, the forced imposition of an alien, European settler-colonial regime on a war-ravaged and defenceless non-European people, a regime so virulent and toxic as to turn their world literally upside down.

Vivian Gabriel (of which more in a follow-up post) is the author of one of the earliest, if not the earliest, critiques of the Zionist invasion of Palestine ever penned. His lengthy, 25-page article, The Troubles of the Holy Land, appeared in The Edinburgh Review of January, 1922. While the whole is well worth seeking out and reading, for the purposes of this post I've picked out some of the key passages and added linking summaries:

Beginning with a thumbnail sketch of Palestine's geography and population, Gabriel moves to an account of Ottoman Palestine. And what a contrast it is to Palestine under the succeeding British/Zionist heel.

"Before the war the people had their own elected representatives, generally from the leading local families, in the Imperial Parliament at Constantinople. They had also local self-government in the administrative council of the province. This was elected by the district councils, which were in turn chosen by the municipalities and village councils. Very few Turkish officials were stationed in Palestine, the majority of functionaries there being natives of the country. The administration, whatever its faults, was simple, inexpensive and suited to the people. Until the war, it was popular enough. The people resented conscription for the Turkish army and despised their Turkish rulers as men of inferior culture; but, on the whole, they were contented, secure and tranquil. The normal Turkish garrison was only about 400 men. The established religion was Moslem but there was complete toleration for other religions, and the various communities, e.g., the Orthodox Greeks, the Jews, the Catholics, each had their own charter of liberties and their own jurisdictional courts. The incidence of taxation was about 26 shillings a head of the population, but much latitude was allowed and actually not more than 20 were collected. The country paid its way and even yielded a handsome surplus to its Turkish rulers, to say nothing of the assigned revenues that went to the bondholders of the Ottoman Public Debt. Concessions for the development of mineral resources, ports and railways, had already been granted and work on them commenced. Fruit and grain enough for export were produced, and there were large gains also from the Christian pilgrim traffic.

"It has long been the fashion in this country to decry the 'unspeakable' Turk and to talk glibly of Ottoman misgovernment. To the student of administrative methods, the 'Corps du Droit Ottoman' tells quite a different tale. The regulations it contains are certainly suited to the people and conditions, and many of them, particularly those relating to representative institutions and the collection of the revenue, had been drawn up by the best experts in Europe and were the direct survivals of the old Roman law that was applied in the Asiatic provinces, with later infiltrations from the Napoleonic codes. Among these laws was one protecting the people from foreign exploitation by restricting immigration, and another confining transactions in real estate to Ottoman subjects.

"During the war, the people of Palestine suffered very badly. They were treated by the Turks as an alien hostile race, for their pro-Ally sympathies were well known: they were robbed and starved; their crops were seized, their fields cut up for trenches; their businesses were ruined and their able-bodied men were forcibly conscripted, even after 3 payments of exemption tax; tens of thousands of them died from pestilence or famine. When therefore the British and Allied forces over-ran the Holy Land, they were welcomed with such joy as had not been known before. It was indeed a liberation and the traditions of the British name promised great things for the future. Men wore their best clothes and strangers embraced each other on the roads from sheer gladness. There were endless 'Te Deums' in village mosques and churches, or in what the law had left in them."

Gabriel has more to say in the same vein but the following sentence on 1918 Palestine is telling: "The problem of Palestine was perhaps the easiest of solution of those that had been left to Great Britain as a result of the war." But no, they had to stuff it up, didn't they?

"The picture now presented by [High Commissioner] Sir Herbert Samuel's report, and by the reports of the commission on the Palestine disturbances [of 1921] and of the Zionist Organization, is by no means so refreshing, and recent visitors to Palestine find the situation overhung with clouds, the population sullen, morose and angry. The people say openly that they were better off under the Turks and are only restrained from violence by the fear of British bayonets; the machinery of military coercion is everywhere in evidence; public security no longer exists and even the High Commissioner himself travels with an armed escort; concessions have been suspended and developments remain in abeyance; the Holy Places are neglected, the government is out of touch with the people.

"Something must have gone seriously wrong in the interval to have produced a change so marked and unexpected. History records no other instance of the same kind under British rule."

Gabriel goes on to sketch the rise and rise of the Zionist movement, culminating in the issuance, by the government of Lloyd George and Lord Balfour, of the Balfour Declaration, which gave official British backing to the creation of a Jewish state... sorry, National Home, in Palestine, a development which quickened the pulse of many a European and North American Jew.

"In Palestine itself," however, writes Gabriel, "the people whose national home it already was took quite another view. They were still under the Turks, from whom they first heard of it. It was, to use their own phrase, a bolt from the blue, and they were thoroughly alarmed at the economic difficulty of two national homes in one house. Their great ambition was the promised independence and, notwithstanding Turkish taunts, they refused to believe that the British would not keep their word. This was their attitude at the beginning of the occupation, but a few months later, when a Zionist Commission under the leadership of Dr Weizmann arrived in Palestine, they began to be seriously perturbed."

This semi-official body, in its arrogance, proceeded to behave as though it owned the place. Hebrew was made an official language and the Zionists were given a monopoly over development. "Matters reached such a pass towards the end of 1918 that the chief administrator of Palestine was compelled to ask either for a military force to repress the civil population, or for a definite pronouncement of policy that would enable him to allay the popular excitement," wrote Gabriel.

A joint British-French proclamation promising popularly elected governments in their respective colonies... sorry, Mandates, was issued but the smooth-talking Dr Weizmann had Whitehall's ear and the proclamation's promise of democratic rule vanished as quickly as an Obama statement calling for an Israeli settlement freeze in the occupied Palestinian territories today. Things came to a head with the appointment of Britain's first civilian ruler, the British Zionist politician, Sir Herbert Samuel.

"The public had become thoroughly alarmed, and the tension was not allayed by the acts of Sir Herbert Samuel's government. The Jewish element in the public service was disproportionately increased and in nearly every position where a native was found he was counterbalanced by a Jew. The employment of a large number of Jewish workmen and labourers out of all proportion to the Jewish population of the country had displaced Arab labour and was a means of using public money for the very support of the immigrants whose introduction was viewed with hostility and alarm; men talked in whispers in the street and were afraid to use the post or telegraph; the official use of Hebrew was largely extended, and the native's ignorance of this tongue provided a reason for edging him out in favour of the Jew; even the postage stamps were surcharged with an inscription signifying 'the Land of Israel'; Zionists openly referred to the High Commissioner as 'the Prince of Israel'; the natives suffered great loss in 1920 by the prohibition of the export of grain in order to feed the foreign immigrants; an advisory council was formed, but it was nominated by the High Commissioner and contained an official majority; there was no representative government such as the people had been used to. A spark would have set the country in a blaze at any moment, and the High Commissioner evidently lived in constant apprehension of concerted action by the people. Machine guns and armoured cars were frequently paraded; at every railway station there was a Jewish linesman to watch the native station-master; the Arab notables were required to give security to keep the peace, although they had never broken it, or be imprisoned by default; the native press was muzzled while the Zionist ran free."

Gabriel concluded, in part: "It should not be forgotten that the Balfour Declaration is a pact between the Government and the Zionists, not between the latter and the Arabs, who were no party to it at all, and still refuse to have any official dealings whatever with Zionists. If by pursuing the present policy a worse than Irish question is allowed to grow, the land of our 3 great cognate faiths will be a shame to the whole world."

Now, what was that about tit-for-tat?

Classic Zionist Effrontery

Sometimes historical events leave us flabbergasted. The shadowy manoeuvrings which led to the issuance of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 are one such case. They leave us not just asking why, but screaming it. To my knowledge no one has ever registered their outrage over the matter quite like British journalist and historian J.M.N. Jeffries:

"Meanwhile, far from desert warfare and from the perils of the scaffold, another cause was making its progress. Bella gerant alii... Zionism wedded itself civilly first to this country and then to that. In the United States it was organizing itself with marked success, which meant a great deal, since of all the Jews in the world at least 3 million were in the United States. These were concentrated too in the large cities where their influence had greatest play. On the 2nd of October [1916] most of the chief Jewish organizations issued a joint manifesto... This manifesto demanded for the Jews full rights wherever they lived in the world, as well of course as the abrogation of all extant laws or regulations prejudicial to them. 'It being understood', explained the manifesto, 'that the phrase 'full rights' is deemed to include (1) Civil, religious and political rights; (2) The securing and protection of Jewish rights in Palestine'.

"The second item needed all the 'deeming' and the 'understanding' which its authors could give it, but they did not delay to argue their case. In or out of the United States they proclaimed it vociferously, and that on the whole was enough. But in England well co-ordinated action was taken by them.

"Matters had reached such a state [as an official Zionist Organization report was to explain later] that in October 1916 the Zionist Organization felt justified in putting forward a formal statement of its views as to the future government of Palestine in the event of its coming under the control of England or France.

"This was a big advance, co-related of course with the development in the United States. So far the Zionist Organization's views, even though incorporated in Foreign Office memoranda, had been laid unofficially before the British Government. Now these views were to be presented as a formal statement, officially, as though the Zionist Organization possessed an internationally established status which might be affected by the advance of England and of France into the Syrian territories. Whence this status was gained remains undiscoverable. But the document which presupposed it was adroitly accepted by the British Government and thereby the said status, though it did not exist, was recognized.

"The document was rather a long one, divisible roughly under 6 heads. One clause demanded that a Jewish Chartered Company should be established of which the purpose would be the resettlement of Palestine by Jewish settlers. This Chartered Company project was not a new one: the Sultan Abdul Hamid had been asked to consider something similar. It had British precedents of the most attractive character, and without doubt the Chartered Company was expected to dissolve in short course into a Government, more easily even than such Companies had dissolved into Governments in India and in South Africa.

"Meanwhile, it was to have power 'to exercise the right of pre-emption of Crown and other lands and to acquire for its own use all or any concessions which may at any time be granted by the suzerain Government or Governments'.

"Reading this, one is led to ask, 'Why have a suzerain Government at all?' The Jewish Chartered Company of Palestine was to have at its disposal any land anywhere at any time in that country. Any concessions which anyone else might obtain or might have obtained were to be taken away from him and were to be bestowed on the Chartered Company. Nothing was left for the 'suzerain' to do but the clerical work of surrendering everything and of expropriating everybody. (In fact, though it may not seem credible, the general scheme of this clause actually was enforced within about 5 years, in favour of the notorious Rutenberg concessions.)

"Another clause ran: 'Inasmuch as the Jewish population in Palestine forms a community with a distinct nationality and religion, it shall be officially recognized by the suzerain Government or Governments as a seperate national unit or nationality'.

"Upon which clause it might well be observed that inasmuch as the Jewish population in Palestine then did not form a distinct nationality but was divided amongst all the nationalities of eastern Europe and some of western Europe and some of Asia; that inasmuch as at least three-quarters of that population had no sympathy with political Zionism and continued to repudiate it after it had come to Palestine; inasmuch as the identification of the Jews as a religious body or the adherents of a creed was then and still is rejected by the political Zionists; therefore there does not appear to be cause for official recognition here of anything but of three separate units of fallacy.

"The most significant clause of all, though, was that in which the Arabs came in for mention. Astonishingly, they did come in for mention in a Zionist document of that date. But in what manner? 'The present population, being too small, too poor, and too little trained to make rapid progress, requires the introduction of a new and progressive element in the population, desirous of devoting all its energies and capital to the work of colonization on modern lines'.

"The Arabs, the 'present population' of the above paragraph, at the time numbered some 675,000, and Palestine is of merely county dimensions. These however were not facts to detain the Zionist Organization. It dismissed the Arabs without further consideration, after what seemed without doubt the conclusive remark that their population was 'small and poor'. To be small and poor is the supreme crime in a category of thought which, curiously, is itself small and poor.

"Therefore these Arabs, exiguous in their hundreds of thousands, required 'the introduction of a new and progressive element'. Sentences of such surpassing effrontery as this one are rare, and it would be hard to find anything matching in insolence the whole clause. What right had the Zionist Organization to talk of what the Arabs needed? None whatsoever.

"Still, whether the clause or the whole programme of which it was a part were insolent or not, the programme of the Chartered Company was accepted as a foundation-stone by the British Government. 'The Government', says the Zionist Report, 'seems to have regarded the Zionist claims embodied in the programme as forming a basis for discussion'. Negotiations thenceforth went on steadily. Talks with individual statesmen 'gave place to discussions of a more formal character. Zionism won recognition as one of the complex problems connected with the Middle East on the one hand and the question of small nationalities on the other'. (Zionist Official Report)

"There it is. A better example could not be supplied of the sophistries by which the hapless Arabs were to be supplanted. Zionism, political Zionism, not alone was confirmed in the status it had acquired out of the skies, but now was advanced a stage beyond. Political Zionism became one of the 'complex problems connected with the Middle East'. All in a flash it was enrolled amidst the problems which by and by the Allies must face.

"The role thus assumed by political Zionism was one unwarranted by any law, any deed, any political conditions which were then in existence, or previously had been for over a thousand years. Zionism as a political entity had owned no situation outside the brains of its own recent devisers. Political Zionism was not something engrained in the soil of the Near East, nor had it any place amidst the problems which the Ottoman Empire handed on so profusely to its successors.

"The Ottoman Empire had been approached and had refused to introduce this amidst its many complicated factors. It would not have a Jewish enclave. No statesman in the world had toiled for years over Zionism, no statesman in the world had inherited dossiers in hundreds filled with the negotiations of his predecessors-in-office concerning it. It simply was not a problem at all. There was a Jewish problem in Eastern Europe; there was none in Palestine. It was intended now to introduce the problem where it had never existed, but that was to create a problem - something vastly different. In fact, to say that political Zionism was a complex problem connected with the Middle East was a thumping lie. Its true situation in the realm of politics was that of a theory just beginning to be exploited in London and Paris and New York.

"The complexity attributed to it was wholly unreal. What was called complexity only meant the difficulty of finding a formula opaque enough to disguise the immediate or future annexation of Palestine.

"But sophistry did not confine itself to slipping political Zionism in this way in among the problems of the Middle East. With the same stroke Zionism also won 'recognition as a problem connected with the question of small nationalities'. Indeed it did. The operative word... is 'connected'. By more adroitness that which had been nothing, but had been transmogrified into a problem, was now again transmogrified from a problem into a small nation, by coupling it to various lesser lands.

"The scheme for this can be visualized. In 1916 the small nations were already forming up to put their pleas to the (it was hoped) conquering Allies. Together they made a political caravan, a train if you like. When the moment came they would all set off together, the train would depart for the terminus where the victorious Peace was being prepared. The political Zionists were ready for this. Rapidly and unostentatiously a van labelled 'Zionist Problem' would be connected to the last carriage. The train would puff away. Somewhere en route the label would disappear, and a van inscribed 'Jewish National Home' would draw eventually alongside the arrival platform, behind Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Latvia and all the others. The whole scheme is very simple. But the chance of watching the manoeuvre is not often given." (Palestine: The Reality, 1939, pp 127-130)

None So Blind

"Many, perhaps even most of the greatest crimes have been committed not in the dark... but in full view of so many people who simply chose not to look and not to question." (Wilful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril, Margaret Heffernan)

What is euphemistically described as the 'Middle East conflict' or the 'Palestine problem', perhaps the greatest colonial running-sore of modern times, began as an act of wilful blindness. Consider the following line of thought:

"Reading [Theodor Herzl's declarations], the reader may be conscious of a remarkable anomoly in them. If Herzl's fundamental thesis was that persecuted or unenfranchised Jews should get away from their false environment and found a State where they would be by themselves and so be the equals of any men, if this was what Herzl meant, how then could he come to consider Palestine as a spot where such a State could be founded? It was a territory where the Jews could not be self-secure, for the Arabs were already living there in hundreds of thousands. How could Herzl fix his eyes on Palestine then, where the conditions for his Sinn Fein 'ourselves alone' State were unobtainable?"

This obvious question - 'What about the Palestinian Arabs?' - so beautifully framed by British author and journalist J.M.N. Jeffries (1880-1960) in his 1939 book Palestine: The Reality, goes direct to the fatal flaw at the heart of political Zionism.

Jeffries continues:

"The question may well be asked. But it would be difficult for Zionism to provide an answer to it. Nothing is more significant of the character of the Zionist movement than the fact that in those crucial days of last century it never paid the least attention to the Arabs who peopled the country upon which all its efforts were directed. Not a lift of a Zionist eyebrow seems to have been wasted upon an Arab form.

"The sincere Mr Stein is one of the few Zionist writers who seems conscious of this shortcoming. He does what he can to rectify it. 'When Herzl', he explains, 'had spoken of a Charter' (from the Sultan) 'he had not, needless to say, contemplated any eviction of the Arabs of Palestine in favour of the Jews. He was, to judge from his Congress addresses, hardly aware that Palestine had settled inhabitants, and he had, in perfect good faith, omitted the Arabs from his calculations'.

"Was there ever anything more extraordinary than this? Vast plans are made engaging the destinies of a multitude of people, yet the man who engenders these plans never takes the essential first step of surveying the land where he proposes to carry them out. Nor apparently do any of his associates suggest it to him. There might be no Arabs in the world for all the difference it makes to him or to his associates.

"Year by year Zionist congresses are summoned, and from their platforms and in the corridors of the assembly speakers discourse incessantly about themselves, about champions and about opponents of the cause within the ranks of Jewry, about the dove-tailing of ill-fitting factors in their programme, about their hopes and their fears of Gentile help, about their own culture and their own need for spiritual expansion. Without doubt these were reasonable and respectable topics. When however were they put aside to consider the existence of inhabitants in the land which the Congress members proposed to acquire? When indeed? Was a single day's session of a single Congress devoted to the discussion of the understanding which must be reached with the people of Palestine? Not one.

"Herzl's own situation is the most extraordinary of all. He justly becomes celebrated. He goes about the world spreading his gospel. He interviews monarchs and chiefs-of-government. Strange interviews they must have been, for he is closeted with the Sultan, the ruler of Palestine, yet comes away without news that Palestine has a population. He interviews the Pope and talks with him of the custody of the Holy Places, but never learns of the Christian inhabitants who frequent them. He even visits Palestine, but seems to find nobody there but his fellow-Jews. Arabs apparently vanish before him as in their own Arabian nights. The Arabic tongue at the moment of utterance is transmuted magically into Hebrew or Yiddish or German!

"But it is when we turn from Herzl to his associate leaders, and still more when we consider the action of the chiefs of Zionism who immediately succeeded him, that his plea of not having perceived the Arabs cannot be entertained. We are given to understand that this blankness of view persisted for some 6 or 7 years. Mr Stein, writing of the period round 1905, says that 'it was now coming to be realized that Palestine was not empty'. Herzl had died after the Sixth Congress, in 1904, and his death marks a demarcation.

"I cannot see how it can be held that for 6 years a great number of admittedly intelligent educated men remained ignorant of the presence of the Arabs. If they did remain so ignorant, theirs was as bad a case of culpable ignorance as can be imagined, and they cannot be allowed to profit by it. But I do not believe in this ignorance, and I maintain that the-half-and-half prolongation of it which was kept up till the War, and to all intents was resumed afterwards (as will be seen when the Balfour Declaration is analysed), altogether discredits the leaders of the Zionist cause as well as their friends in our own Cabinet.

"There were 19 Jewish colonies established in Palestine before the year 1900. The colonies of Rishon-le-Zion, Zichron Jacob and Rosh Pinah had been founded in the early 'eighties, and housed thousands of Jews who had fled from Russia. The international Jewish Colonization Association, founded by Baron Hirsch in 1891, was busy in 1900 reorganizing these colonies, which had been over-subsidized by Baron Edmond de Rothschild. The Choveve Zion or 'Lovers of Zion' organization, established in Russia, but with committees in Vienna, Berlin, New York, Paris and London, had been engaged in Jewish settlement for 6 years. The 'Jewish Colonial Trust' had been founded and registered in England to collect funds for use in Palestine and had received a quartrer of a million pounds in its first year. The Jewish 'National Fund', created to acquire land in Palestine, was founded in 1901. In Jerusalem there were many thousands of Jews, and also in Jaffa.

"All these trusts and colonies and the people who inhabited them were in regular and continuous communication with Jewish bodies and persons throughout Europe and America. Many of the Jews of Jerusalem were subsidized by pious co-religionists, so that they alone were responsible for a network of correspondence between Palestine an innumerable synagogues and congregations everywhere. The Choveve Zion and the secular associations necessarilly were drawn into association with the Zionist Organization and with the Zionist Congresses. At Basle and at the succeeding Congresses there was infinite discussion about the colonies.

"In a hundred ways the conditions prevailing in Palestine and the existence of the Arabs and the varying ways in which the Arabs reacted to existing colonies and to the promise of more colonies must have been known to all Zionists.

"The only conclusion then, and it is a conclusion forced on the observer, is that if Zionism was unaware of the Arabs it was because most Zionists perceived an obstacle in the Arabs and did not want to be aware of them. The Zionist leaders, and the more prominent of their followers, obsessed with the absurd notion that Palestine had always been the patrimony of the Jews, did not intend to be aware of anything which conflicted with this. To have made approaches to the Arab population, and to have discussed at any length the bar which that population presented or might present to the accomplishment of their plans, would have to disconfess the plea upon which those plans were based. It would have disclosed to most of the non-Jewish world, and indeed to a good part of the Jewish world, that there was a factor in existence which upset the whole formula of Jewish ownership.

"I do not say that all of the leading Zionists viewed the matter quite in this fashion. Some of them will have thought about the Arabs in a careless, indifferent way. They will have considered them as nobodies who would disappear presently, decamping from the soil after a little money had been spent or by some other almost natural sequence. They would vanish like the mist before the sun of Zion.

"Those who thought like this wasted no time in discussing persons of such little import as the Arabs. As far as they themselves were concerned the Sultan of Turkey was the temporary population of Palestine. Of him they did talk, and with him they dealt, if unsuccessfully.

"But most of the principal figures of Zionism must lie under the imputation of not having desired to perceive the Arabs. Their attention had been called to them by one man at least who belonged to their own number, Achad Ha'am. Achad Ha'am was the pen-name of Asher Ginsberg, whose essays and treatises became the literary focus of all Jews who opposed the establishment of a Jewish State. His patent disinterestedness and his altruism marked him out amidst his contemporaries. He declared that the political Zionists, that is to say those who worked for a Jewish State, were ruining the cause. 'Judaism', wrote he in 1897, 'needs at present but little. It needs, not an independent State, but only the creation in its native land of conditions favourable to its development; a good-sized settlement of Jews working without hindrance in every branch of culture, from agriculture and handicrafts to science and literature'.

"Achad Ha'am protested even some years before the Basle Conference against the Zionist wilful or casual exclusion of the Arabs. It was folly, he said, to treat them as wild men of the desert who could not see what was going on around them. At the Basle Conference he sat 'solitary amid his friends, like a mourner at a wedding-feast', and wrote afterwards of 'the complete absurdity of Herzl's statesmanship, aimed inexorably at a Jewish state in Palestine'. Twenty-three years later, in 1920, he wrote, 'From the very beginning we have always ignored the Arab people'." (pp 39-43)

114 Years of Zionist Bombast

Israel's the best! Better than all the rest:

From the very first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897...

"Some months have passed since the Zionist Congress, but its echoes are still heard in daily life and in the press... In the press all these meetings, with their addresses, motions and resolutions, appear over and over again in the guise of articles - articles written in a vein of enthusiam and triumph. The meeting was magnificent, every speaker was a Demosthenes, the resolutions were carried by acclamation, all those present were swept off their feet and shouted with one voice: 'We will do and obey!' - in a word, everything was delightful, entrancing, perfect. And the Congress itself still produces a literature of its own. Pamphlets specially devoted to its praises appear in several languages; Jewish and non-Jewish papers still occasionally publish articles and notes about it; and needless to say, the 'Zionist' organ [Die Welt, the German paper founded by Herzl] itself endeavours to maintain the impression which the Congress made, and not allow it to fade too rapidly from the public memory. It searches the press of every nation and every land, and wherever it finds a favourable mention of the Congress, even if in some insignificant journal published in the language of one of the smaller European nationalities, it immediately gives a summary of the article, with much jubilation. Only one small nation's language has thus far not been honoured with such attention, though its journals too have lavished praise on the Congress: I mean Hebrew." (The Jewish State & Jewish Problem, Ahad Ha'am, 1897, jewishvirtuallibrary.org)

... to the 'Tent Revolution' of 2011...

"Property prices have risen about 50% since 2008 as Israel's burgeoning population - more than 7 million people squeezed into a slither [sic] of land about a third the size of Tasmania - vastly outstrips construction. The so-called 'tent revolution' has also morphed into a wider protest about the disintegration of communal solidarity and the welfare state. But this is not Israel's equivalent of the 'Arab Spring'. Rothschild Boulevard - a leafy, European-style inner-city thoroughfare where one young woman put up a tent on July 14 in protest against her exhorbitant rent - is not Tahrir Square. There is no violence, no looting, no thuggery. The protesters are not armed with guns or stones; they bear banners with slogans such as 'the people demand social justice' and 'the people will take back the country'. This has not led to violent clashes with police, let alone government-backed armies mowing down civilians like in Syria, Tunisia or Libya. Nor has it led to urban anarchy, as has happened in Britain. In short, this is the Jewish state's democratic pulse beating as it has since the day it was born. For popular protests are a sine qua non of Israeli society - virtually every week there's a protest from a different sector of society. And the demonstrations are almost always non-violent..." (Tent city is a beacon of social justice & optimism for all Israelis, Robin Margo*, The Age, 18/8/11) [* "Robin Margo, SC, is president of the New Israel Fund's affiliate in Australia and immediate past president of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies."]

... and everything in between.

A Murky Legacy

Bear with me while I marshal the expert evidence:

1) "For Zionists to succeed you need to have a Jewish state, with a Jewish flag and a Jewish language. The person who really understands that is your fascist, Jabotinsky." (Mussolini on Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of the Revisionist Zionist* movement, quoted in The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir, Lenni Brenner, 1984, p 98)

2) "It is a sign of the bitter hostility of Labour Zionism* to the memory of the man [Jabotinsky] that David Ben-Gurion routinely referred to as 'Vladimir Hitler' that the Israeli government did not issue an order [to transfer his remains** to Israel] until July 1964, 16 years after the establishment of the Israeli state." (ibid p 108) [** Jabotinsky died in New York in 1940 but wanted his remains transferred to a future Jewish state in Palestine.]

3) "To some British officials... the atrocity at Deir Yassin [perpetrated by the Revisionist Zionist terror organisations, the Irgun and the Stern Gang] came as a revelation about the nature of the new Jewish state. Sir John Troutbeck, the head of the British Middle East Office in Cairo, wrote that 'Deir Yassin is a warning of what a Jew will do to gain his purpose'. On the eve of the Arab-Israeli war the British were apprehensive about its outcome, but virtually no one anticipated the extent of the Arab collapse and the Israeli victory. The British associated themselves with the Arab cause as one that was ultimately compatible with their own sense of mission in the Middle East, and during the course of the war they became convinced that a grave injustice was being perpetrated because of American support of the Israelis. The resentment towards the US still smoulders in the files at the Public Record Office. It existed as the main sentiment underlying official policy, and it was perhaps most indignantly expressed by Troutbeck, who held that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by 'an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders'." (The Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez & Decolonisation, William Roger Louis, 2006, pp 445-446)

4) "When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it the Terrorist organisations built up from our own ranks. I am not willing to see anybody associated with those misled and criminal people." Albert Einstein's written response to an American Stern Gang (LEHI) fundraiser on 10/4/09, the day after the Deir Yassin massacre. [Einstein's letter can be viewed at Deir Yassin Remembered, deir.yassin.org]

5) "In September 1948 Churchill was in the South of France... Among those who visited him there was a Conservative Member of Parliament, Robert Boothby, a strong supporter of Zionism, who had written to The Times protesting against the Arab Legion shelling of Jerusalem. Boothby later recalled that when the conversation turned to the future of the Jews then fighting for their survival on the battlefield, 'I said that they were going to win hands down in Palestine, and get more than they ever expected'. To Boothby's remark, Churchill replied: 'Of course. The Arabs are no match for them. The Irgun people are the vilest gangsters. But, in backing the Zionists these Labour people backed the winners; and then ran out on them'. Churchill also told Boothby he was 'quite right' to send his letter to The Times." (Churchill & The Jews, Martin Gilbert, 2007, p 270)

[*Although the difference between the Revisionist and Labour Zionism is more a matter of style than substance, Uri Davis has pointed out that: "Labour Zionism is an attempt to reconcile the basic tenets of political Zionist and colonial practice with the tenets of the Enlightenment. Since these two sets of values are mutually exclusive, Labour Zionist literature has been largely predicated upon obfuscation of Zionist colonial practice, and upon mystification, ignorance and cultivated deception. Revisionist Zionism has largely escaped the Labour Zionist predicament of attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable. In contra-distinction to Labour Zionism, it has attempted, with considerable success, to locate Zionism ideologically and practically inside the tradition of modern secular racism and imperial colonialism." (Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within, 2003, p 19)]

Hm... gangsters, terrorists, criminals, fascists and Nazis. Well the progeny of this lot, via the mechanism of Irgun leader Menachem Begin's Likud Party, are now in power in Israel. Israeli Prime Minister and Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu's father was a senior Jabotinsky aide. Ex-Likud, now Kadima leader (reportedly being 'wooed' by Netanyahu) Tzipi Livni is the daughter of Eitan Livni, the Irgun's Chief of Operations. And they're so proud of their legacy of gangsterism, terrorism, criminality, fascism and Nazism that they want Israeli kids to share it:

"The Education Ministry is introducing a study unit on the 12 underground fighters who were hanged or committed suicide in prison during the British Mandate in Palestine. The 12, known as 'Olei Hagardom' ('those hanged on the gallows'), belonged to the pre-state militias Etzel [Irgun] and Lehi [Stern Gang]. The program, intended for eighth and ninth grades, will include lessons plus a national competition for essays, poems and drawings on subjects such as 'an imaginary conversation I had with one of Olei Hagardom in his last moments in prison' or 'the last letter of a condemned man to his family'. The new unit is already proving controversial. 'Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar is advancing ideological matters close to his heart in the education system', a ministry official charged. 'His ideology is entering the curriculum'. 'It's worrying that the education Ministry is conveying a message sanctifying death and portraying it as sublime', added a senior university historian. Until now, details of the 12 Olei Hagardom - 9 Etzel combatants and 3 Lehi fighters - were taught as part of history lessons, ministry sources said. In a letter announcing the new program, Sa'ar wrote, 'I hope the program, recounting Olei Hagardom's devotion to the struggle for Israel's independence, will bolster the students' ties with their people and heritage... and that their devotion will serve as an ideological model for our youth'... The education system intends to mark Jabotinsky Day next week as required by a law enacted in 2005, the Education Ministry said Monday. Schools were instructed earlier this month to prepare ceremonies and special activities, including lessons about Jabotinsky's character and work. Sa'ar himself will give a civics lesson on Jabotinsky in a high school in the West Bank settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim." (New study unit on pre-state fighters proves controversial, Or Kashti, Haaretz, 22/12/09)

Way to go! Except that Zionist propagandists of whatever stripe are nothing if not hypocritical. Here's David Feith* in the Wall Street Journal on August 21 pondering (in the words of The Australian where I found it) "the murky legacy of Fateh leader Yasser Arafat": "What's Arabic for plus ca change? Because that was the message last week from the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, where the 'moderate' Fateh party held its first general congress since 1989. Fateh - founded by Yasser Arafat in the 1960s and led since 2004 by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas - demonstrated that Palestinian national politics remain mired as ever in conspiracy, duplicity and the glorification of terrorists... Fatah's leaders continue to walk in their founder's footsteps... Fatah's demonstration last week that it remains ideologically stuck in the terrorist pleasantries of the 70s ought to be a stark reminder that when it comes to Palestinian 'moderates', moderation remains a highly relative term." (Fatah's 'moderates' still rejoice in their founder's terrorism, 26/8/09) [* That's correct, son of neocon Douglas]

It doesn't get much more pot & kettle than that.

Breathtaking Zionist Arrogance

As part of its propaganda offensive, Israel's cheer squad have turned the opinion pages of The Australian into their own personal romper room. (I'm rephrasing Max Blumenthal here - see his 5/1/09 post Why aren't more Americans dancing to Israel's tune?, maxblumenthal.com.) To date we've had Israeli ambassador Yuval Rotem, Alan Dershowitz, Philip Mendes, Shmuel Rosner, Greg Sheridan, Colin Rubenstein, David Aaronovitch, Assa Doron, Martin Peretz, Bret Stephens and Melanie Phillips. In a tokenistic effort, only two - two! - critical voices, Amin Saikal and Sonja Karkar, managed a foot in the door. Today, I single out two of the cheer squad for comment:-

Philip Mendes is an Australian academic - a lecturer in social work at Monash University - who likes to think of himself as an even-handed progressive:

"My two-state position was based on moral and practical grounds for a Palestinian state. The moral case recognised that the creation of Israel in 1948 had inflicted an overwhelming injustice on the Palestinians. Yet, as a Jew, I believed the creation of Israel was a necessary act of affirmative action in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and had to take precedence over opposing claims. However, I also believed the Palestinians were entitled to at least partial compensation for the injustice of 1948 by securing a sovereign state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip." (Common ground riven by a cultural gulf, 3/1/09) That "had to take precedence over" is the essence of Zionist arrogance and moral corruption. It bespeaks the arrogance of nationalist zealots for whom the tragedy of European Jewry is nothing more than a convenient cover for their naked colonial land-grab in Palestine.

Having swallowed the 19th century Zionist ideological construct that Jews the world over, including himself, constitute an entity labelled 'the Jewish people', Mendes here asserts the incredible idea that that 'people', his people, have a superior right to the land of Palestine than its indigenous Arab inhabitants. Breathtaking!

But there's more from our social worker: formerly optimistic, he's now quite pessimistic about his preferred two-state solution because - wait for it - "the Palestinians view themselves as the victims of a historical wrong" (So this is merely the Palestinian view? The reality is otherwise? If so, how does Mendes explain his own acknowledgment above that "the creation of Israel in 1948 had inflicted an overwhelming injustice on the Palestinians"?).

And, get this, according to Mendes, the Palestinians believe that that historical wrong "can be resolved only by the implementation of a just solution. Justice is defined in absolute rather than relative terms and all other opposing narratives are unequivocally rejected." IOW, if you are to believe Mendes, the Palestinians are hung-up on absolute justice! (Could Mendes and his kind be said to have a Holocaust hang-up, I wonder?)

Exactly what this supposed Palestinian penchant for absolute justice comes down to emerges when he writes, "I do believe the dominant viewpoint within Palestinian society [evidence?] is unwilling to compromise on key symbolic issues such as the right of return, and that this viewpoint is likely to preclude a negotiated peace based on a midway point between the Israeli and Palestinian narratives." So, for Mendes and his mates, Article 13(2) (Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is merely a "symbolic issue," OK for everyone else maybe, but not for Palestinians. But why?

It's what Mendes doesn't spell out in his propaganda piece that matters: if the Palestinian refugees are allowed to return to what is left of their towns and villages in Israel (im)proper as full citizens, then we might end up with a situation where there are actually more non-Jews in Israel than Jews, and the whole concept of an ethno-religious Jewish state, based on a demographic majority of Jews, becomes problematic. So, in the Mendes/Zionist bubble, the maintenance of a sectarian Jewish state trumps the implementation of a universal right. And also, in the bubble, to uphold the demand for a sectarian state, which discriminates in law between Jews and non-Jews, makes one a relativist open to compromise, while arguing for the implementation of a universal right makes one an uncompromising absolutist.

Martin Peretz is the editor-in-chief of US rag The New Republic:

"The bitter fact is that, while the Jews prepared for a homeland state from the early 1920s until 1948... the Palestinians did almost nothing except resent and resist the future." (West must guarantee resolution with Gaza, 7/1/09) But of course, when a bunch of developers from Europe, backed by British bayonets, turn up in your green and pleasant land with the intention of turning it into their very own tar and cement strip-mall, what are you going to do, Marty, shower them with flowers then make yourself obligingly scarce?

"... Gaza Palestinians who... routinely shift in their own minds from armed killers to innocent victims." The Israeli pendulum exactly: IDF terrorists one minute, helpless, quivering in their bomb shelters the next.

"Maybe [statehood] can be devolved on the West Bank in short order rather than long, given especially an exchange of territory between Israel and the new Palestine... Some Israeli land with Palestinian inhabitants might be transferred [!!!] to the freshly independent entity, with the accumulated social benefits of the population transferred with them as well." IOW, while we're in the business of bestowing a fragmented statehood on the West Bank Palestinians, why can't we use the opportunity to hive off those fast-breeding, Bolshie Israeli Arabs whom we, to the extent possible with these untermenschen, have civilized, to the undoubted benefit of their backward West Bank cousins? Hey, it'd be a win-win! Ethnic cleansing - the quintessential Zionist modus operandi!

"It is Europe, hitherto feckless, that needs to guarantee the peace between the Israelis and the Gaza Palestinians. Europe has been Palestine's rhetorical patron. Now let it be Palestine's actual guarantor. That means ensuring the governors of Gaza not rule by the armed doctrine of fanatic and bloodthirsty Islam... With the Palestinian Authority... Europe (by which I mean Britain, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Poland, Canada, Australia [!!!] and a few others) holds the fate of Palestine in its hands." So Israel, having squeezed the Gaza lemon till the pips squeeked, can now drop the battered and bloody mess into Europe's lap. Hey, Marty, wouldn't it be easier and more cost-effective for Europe to squeeze the Israeli lemon, via a trade and diplomatic boycott, until it gets the f..k out of the Palestinian territories and stays out?

Unleashing the Zionist Settler Within

Some relatively sensible comment - for the mainstream media - from the diplomatic editor of The Age:-

"...the very notion of Australia hauling [Ahmadinejad] off to front a criminal tribunal was just a stunt. Labor hatched the scheme in opposition, got a few headlines for its trouble, then allowed a respectable time in office to pass before dumping the idea. The whole episode is illustrative [of the extent of influence, quite contrary to the national interest, of the pro-Israel lobby on LibLab] because it shows governments need not be hostage to bad policy. And to reinforce the lesson, another bad policy went by the wayside last weekend, but one more substantive and not of Labor's making. The issue is how Australia votes on key resolutions put before the United Nations relating to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory [sic]. It is a complex and delicate area - hardly a surprise when dealing with this conflict. Each year a series of resolutions are put to the General Assembly, broadly demanding Israel fairly treat the Palestinians. And for years, the vast majority of the world, including Australia, has mostly voted in favour. Only Israel voted against all of them, the US against most, as did a few of its client states including the US Marshall Islands, Palau and Micronesia. To put that in proper perspective, it usually added up to a majority of about 160 countries standing against 6 or 8. Australia's position changed in 2003 when the Howard government switched tack, flushed as it was with the neo-conservative zeal of the Iraq war and annoyed by a critical finding in the International Court of Justice against the wall Israel has built to fence off the West Bank. So for the past 5 years, Australia has been offside with the international community. Remarkably, this meant Australia abstained from a call for Israel, the occupying power, to abide by the Geneva Convention for the protection of civilians, leaving us in pretty miserable company. Australia has now gone back to the majority, and voted in favour of applying the Geneva Conventions. Australia also dropped its opposition to a call for Israel to cease building settlements in occupied territory. This is a risky move for the Government, but an important one. Upsetting Israel is the obvious danger, annoying some in Australia's Jewish community is another - not to mention being seen to abandon the US, Australia's principal ally... Israel was apparently well aware of Australia's intentions before the vote and has no great concerns over the shift. So, why make the change? For one thing, it is the right approach. Australia can be a friend to Israel and at the same time firmly impress upon Tel Aviv the need to abide by international standards. But there is also another interest at play - the Government's campaign for a UN Security Council seat in 2013-14. During the failed bid in 1996, Australia lost a crucial bloc of votes from Islamic states, and informed circles aware of the events at the time blame the then new Howard government for taking a hopelessly pro-Israel stance. Having kept up its opposition to the UN resolution on the Geneva Conventions, the Government would have no chance of winning a seat at the table. The switch should not be interpreted as a compromise. If anything, Australia's former position compromised our international standing." (How to reverse bad policy: The Government has successfully changed tack on Iran & Israel, Daniel Flitton, The Age, 14/11/08)

This was followed by the following hilarious whine on the letters page (15/11/08), from a Robert Friedman of Caulfield North, that inadvertently sends the message that, yes, up to this change of vote, Australia has in fact been Israel's lapdog: "It is important to note that of the '160-odd countries' that voted for the resolutions, about 60 are members of either the Organisation of Islamic States or the Arab League or both. [Well, that invalidates their vote, now doesn't it?] Where Australia used to act on its own conscience [Gimme a break!], we now appear to have fallen in line to enhance our chances of a temporary seat on the Security Council. Still lapdogs. Just a new master."

And speaking of the Ruddies' decision "annoying some in Australia's Jewish community," it looks as though, at least for the moment, their self-styled leaders are gritting their teeth and holding their fire":

Labor's Member for Israel, Michael Danby, has reportedly called the decision a "mistake," while the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) and the Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA) are "disappointed and concerned." (UN vote switch sparks debate, The Australian Jewish News, 14/11/08). The AJN's editorial construed it as "a bit of tough love that never hurt anyone," but warned that "should Australia change its voting position once again, 'the gloves will be off', according to one Australian Jewish leader." Watch your back, Kevvie, there's a Rhambo out there!

The bleeding obvious in all of this is that none of the above have the courage of their Zionist convictions. None of them, to my knowledge, have come out and said clearly what they really think - in the manner, for example, of Nadia Matar, "the combative leader of the radical Jewish settler movement Women in Green, [who] has a message for Kevin Rudd. 'The incredible audacity of you', she shouts from her home in Efrat, a Jewish settlement... in the West Bank... 'Who are you to tell me I am not allowed to build here, in my homeland?... Jews are allowed to build in France, in New York, in Australia, but I am not allowed to build here? This is my land... Be very careful', Mrs Matar warned of any further attempts by Australia to put pressure on the Israeli settler movement. 'Don't force us to do something. Not because I need your help - I have God on my side. Just for your own sake, because you might be next'." (Israeli anger that burns brightly, Jason Koutsoukis, Sydney Morning Herald, 15/11/08)

Mrs Matar, who hails originally from Belgium, is surely the authentic voice of Zionism here. No mere grumbling that Kevvie's change of tack is mistaken/disappointing/concerning for her. Why then aren't our local Zionist 'leaders' shouting from the rooftops their support for a Greater Israel from the Mediterranean to the Jordan - if not the Euphrates (Zionism ain't what it used to be)? Why aren't they proudly and publicly defending their courageous settler brethren in the West Bank? Why aren't they coming right out and saying, Geneva Conventions be damned, latter-day Amalekites have no rights in our land? Why aren't they lashing Rudd as the latest reincarnation of Neville Chamberlain? Why, oh why, are they so coy about unleashing their inner Zionist settlers?

Peter Cundall's Palestine

"For it is not just a case of intellectualizing but the choice of an entire way of life. This man, perhaps a warm friend and affectionate father, who in his native country (by his social condition, his family environment, his natural friendships) could have been a democrat, will surely be transformed into a conservative, reactionary, or even a colonial fascist. He cannot help but approve discrimination and the codification of injustice, he will be delighted at police tortures and, if the necessity arises, will become convinced of the necessity of massacres. Everything will lead him to these beliefs: his new interests, his professional relations, his family ties and bonds of friendship formed in the colony. The colonial situation manufactures colonialists, just as it manufactures the colonized." (The Colonizer & The Colonized, Albert Memmi, pp 55-56)

Peter Cundall, the popular 81-year old host of the ABC's Gardening Australia program, is finally retiring from television. An iconic figure, he'll be sorely missed by many. The Sun-Herald's feature on the gardening guru (That's his bloomin' lot, 6/7/08) describes how Cundall, a soldier in the British Army during WW2, was afterwards sent to British Mandate Palestine "where the British Army was given the job of aiding Jewish settlers." Cundall's account of his experience there is revealing:-

"It was a real nightmare. Most of the soldiers who had been in Europe were quite sympathetic to the Jews who were coming from Europe to settle in Palestine because we had been there and seen how they had suffered. Then I came across some of the Jewish settlers who were so racist towards the Palestinians. I thought, 'what's going on? Here are the Jewish people who have suffered terrible discrimination for hundreds of years and they are turning around and discriminating against these people'. They just hated them. Then I suddenly realised that we're all at fault in many ways, we all have weaknesses and even people who have suffered terribly can cause others to suffer terribly."

As Memmi points out, and Cundall confirms, such is the logic of colonialism.

Avnery's Apology: A Critique

Taking the Canadian Prime Minister's recent parliamentary apology to the indigenous people of Canada as his cue, veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery has followed his problematic essay 1948 (see my 1/6/08 post, Uri Avnery: A Critique) with an equally problematic stab at an official Israeli apology (An Apology, 14/6/08) to the Palestinian people:-

"We recognize the fact that we have committed against you an historic injustice, and we humbly ask your forgiveness. When the Zionist movement decided to establish a national home in this country... it had no intention of building our state on the ruins of another people. Indeed, almost no one in the Zionist movement had ever been in the country before the first Zionist Congress in 1897, or even had any idea about the actual situation here."

Avnery at least appears here to concede that there is no meaningful distinction between "national home" and "state." The contrary has, of course, been argued by legions of Zionist propagandists. The notion that the early Zionists were prepared to settle for anything less than a Jewish state has, however, been decisively refuted by Canadian philosopher and author of The Case Against Israel, Michael Neumann: "Could pre-Israel Zionism be understood as the quest for a homeland as opposed to a state?" he asks. "Was this to be a scattering of Jewish homes and farms, or a Jewish country with its own army, police, and government?" Neumann's evidence leaves us in no doubt. To quote just 3 of his many authoritative statements (pp 23-30):

1) "The founder of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, had already in 1896 written an essay called 'Der Judenstaat'. In it, he said, 'The Idea which I have developed in this pamphlet is a very old one: it is the restoration of the Jewish state... Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation, the rest we shall manage for ourselves'."

2) "Max Nordau, Herzl's vice-president at early Zionist congresses, wrote in 1920 that: 'I did my best to persuade the claimants of the Jewish state in Palestine that we might find a circumlocution that would say all we meant, but would say it in a way that would avoid provoking the Turkish rulers of the coveted land. I suggested 'Heimstatte [homeland] as a synonym for state... It was equivocal but we all understood what it meant... to us it signified Judenstaat and it signifies the same now'."

3) "Here is Walter Laqueur's account: 'When a Zionist delegation appeared on 27 February 1919 before the Supreme Allied Council, Weizmann was asked by Lansing, the American secretary of state, what exactly was meant by the phrase 'a Jewish national home'. Weizmann replied that for the moment [my italics] an autonomous Jewish government was not wanted, but that he expected that 70 to 80 thousand Jews would emigrate to Palestine annually. Gradually a nation would emerge which would be as Jewish as the French nation was French and the British nation British. Later, when the Jews formed the large majority, they would establish such a government as would answer to the state of the development of the country and to their ideals'."

But when Avnery claims that "the Zionist movement had no intention of building our state on the ruins of another people," it is hard to take him seriously. Assuming that the early Zionists went about their business of agitating for a homeland/state in Palestine without being aware of the grave implications their project held for the majority indigenous Palestinian Arab population defies belief.

Theodore Herzl, the 'father' of political Zionism, was certainly wise to the matter, writing in his diary in 1895: "We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly. Let the owners of immovable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back. The voluntary expropriation will be accomplished through our secret agents. The Company would pay excessive prices. We shall then sell only to Jews, and all real estate will be traded only among Jews." (Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, I, 51)

Typically, however, as Israeli historian Benny Morris points out in his discussion of the idea of transfer (the Zionist euphemism for ethnic cleansing) in Zionist thinking, the leaders of the movement tended to be forthcoming only in private*. (The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, p 41)

That the logic of the Zionist push for a sovereign Jewish state in Palestine meant that the Palestinians, absent an effective campaign of resistance, were doomed to dispossession, must surely have exercised the minds of all concerned, colonists and colonized alike. Neumann again: "Certainly it was possible that the Zionists would settle for less than all of Palestine. It was possible they would not forcibly transfer the indigenous population; it was just barely possible that, somehow, Zionism would be abandoned altogether. But there was no basis for supposing any of these outcomes likely. Nor could it be assumed that even a territorial compromise could be obtained without catastrophe... Indeed, the Palestinians could look at all of modern European history from the 17th century religious wars to the year of the Balfour Declaration as a record of failed territorial compromises. When settlers move into an inhabited area, territorial compromises are all too often mere pauses in a savage process of dispossession. This was apparent at the time. The rise of Zionism coincided with the last bloody stages of just such a process in the American West. Significantly, the American settler's progressive and very violent displacement of the native inhabitants was not some grand scheme thought out in advance. At many points in the story, the settlers seemed to have got all they wanted. But successful settlement and increasing immigration brought new usurpations. Enough was never, it seemed, enough. Even if the Zionists had never dreamed of taking all of Palestine from the Palestinians, it would have been foolish to suppose that they would not come to do so, bit by bit. The prospect of a Jewish state, therefore, posed a mortal danger to the Palestinians, a prospect of ethnic subjugation and very likely of what is now called ethnic cleansing." (pp 45-46)

As improbable as it sounds, Herzl and others may have entertained fantasies that the Palestinian Arabs could simply be bought out, but the Zionist movement's first Likudnik, Vladimir Jabotinsky, put paid to such nonsense in 1923: "Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birthright to Palestine for cultural and economic gains... Colonization has its own explanation, integral and inescapable, and understood by every Jew and Arab with his wits about him. Colonization can have only one goal. For the Palestinian Arabs this goal is inadmissible... Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population." (See my 12/6/08 post, Pemulwuy in Palestine for a fuller quotation) To this end, Jabotinsky saw the necessity for a successful Zionist colonization to proceed behind an iron wall of bayonets, perhaps British, preferably Jewish. He was adamant that every Jew "with his wits about him" understood the logic of the Zionist enterprise, and that the only question was how to cleanse Palestine of its indigenous population. In fact, even Herzl admitted the need for a Jewish paramilitary corps "in preparation for the struggle against the indigenous population whose land was being systematically occupied." (Diaries, I, 88-89) It was of course Zionist militarism and force of arms, Jabotinsky's "iron wall," that prevailed in 1948. Avnery's depiction of his Zionist forbears as essentially well-intentioned blunderers, therefore, lacks all credibility.

[*David Ben-Gurion, who was later to to preside over the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and become Israel's first prime minister, continued this venerable Zionist tradition of dissimulation. He is described by Benny Morris as a man who "knew what to say and what not to say in certain circumstances; what is allowed to be recorded on paper and what is preferable to convey orally or in hint." (The New History & the Old Propagandists, Haaretz 9/5/89)]

"The Zionist founders who came to this country were pioneers who carried in their hearts the most lofty ideals. They believed in national liberation, freedom, justice and equality. We are proud of them. They certainly did not dream of committing an injustice of historic proportions."

Lofty idealists? How to square this with the testimony of Zionist moderate, Ahad Ha-Am, who wrote as early as 1891: "They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause, and even boast of these deeds; and nobody among us opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination." Ha-Am was later compelled to ask, "Is this the dream of a return to Zion which our people have dreamt for centuries: that we now come to Zion to stain its soil with innocent blood?" He scathingly described Avnery's pioneers as "a small people of new Levantines who vie with other Levantines in shedding blood, in desire for vengeance, and in angry violence? If this be the 'Messiah', then I do not wish to see his coming." (Quoted in The Zionist Mind, Alan R Taylor, p 103)

Or take the findings of the shelved 1919 report, Recommendations of the King-Crane Commission with Regard to Syria-Palestine and Iraq. US President Woodrow Wilson, who believed that the wishes of the population concerned should be the determining element in the choice of a mandatory power, had sent Henry King and Charles Crane to take the pulse of both communities in Syria/Palestine. Finding that Lord Balfour, in his famous 1917 declaration favouring 'the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people', 'it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine', had gone too far, they called for "the extreme Zionist programme" to be "greatly modified. For a national home for the Jewish people is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish State; nor can the erection of such a Jewish State be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission's conferences with Jewish representatives, that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase." This was for public consumption. It was left to the British interviewees to reveal the elephant in the room: given the intensity of the indigenous opposition to unlimited Jewish immigration, "No British officer, consulted by the Commissioners, believed that the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms."

Nor did Ha-Am's "new Levantines" improve with the advent of a leadership "obsessed"* from the 30s on with the idea of forced transfer of the Palestinians (Morris, Haaretz, 9/5/89) - a leadership who even managed to convince themselves that it was "just, moral and correct,"** who hatched and implemented (in April, 1948) Plan Dalet ["a strategic and ideological anchor and basis for expulsions"***] , and who "understood at every level of military and political decision making that a Jewish state without a large Arab minority would be stronger and more viable both militarily and politically."****

[*Morris, Haaretz, 9/5/89; **Morris, 1948 & After: Israel & the Palestinians, p 43; *** Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, p 63; **** Morris, 1948 & After, p 22]

Avnery's idea of "a solution that may not fulfill all justified aspirations nor right all wrongs, but which will allow both our peoples to live their lives in freedom, peace and prosperity" is, of course, the two-state solution: Israel as an apartheid state ("governed by laws of our own making" as he puts it, presumably including those laws which incorporate the distinction between Jews and non-Jews and deny 93% of Israeli territory to non-Jews, Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel and the Palestinian Arab refugees of 1948) on 78% of historic Palestine, and a truncated state of Palestine on the remaining 22% currently occupied by Israel, which he hypes as "... the free and sovereign State of Palestine in all the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, which will be accepted as a full member of the United Nations..." Avnery clings to the stale formula now trotted out by every friend of Israel within coee of a microphone. Meanwhile, the settlements expand, the Jews-only roads snake across the occupied West Bank, and walls and cages spring up around defenceless and impoverished Palestinians faster than than the words 'viable, contiguous and independent Palestinian state' can trip off a politician's lip.

And what of the thorniest problem of all, that of the Palestinian refugees ethnically cleansed by Zionist forces under cover of war in 1948?

We must approach with open hearts, compassion and common sense, the task of finding a just, and viable solution for the terrible tragedy of the refugees and their descendants. Each refugee family must be granted a free choice between the various solutions: repatriation and resettlement in the State of Palestine, with generous assistance; staying where they are or emigration to any country of their choice, also with generous assistance; and yes - coming back to the territory of Israel in acceptable numbers, agreed by us."

Like the two-state solution, Avnery's notion of the refugees exercising a "free choice" of returning to "the territory of Israel in acceptable numbers, agreed by us" is yet another example of his "solution(s) that may not fill all justified aspirations." Despite the fact that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) enshrines the right of all refugees to return and claim their properties (Articles 13 & 17), that the Palestinian refugees have the backing of the UN Charter and international law for their right of return, and that UNGA Resolution 194 calls for precisely that, Avnery is only prepared to go so far.

Sorry, Uri, it's back to the drawing board I'm afraid.