How to Talk to Benjamin Netanyahu

The latest turn of the screw in Israel's Operation Get Corbyn (which came in the wake of a Daily Mail beat-up, which came from... ):

"The laying of a wreath by Jeremy Corbyn on the graves [sic] of the terrorist who perpetrated the Munich massacre and his comparison of Israel to the Nazis deserves unequivocal condemnation from everyone - left, right and everything in between." (Benjamin Netanyahu tweet, 11/8/18)

And Corbyn's withering, tweeted response to this swaggering bully, the ideological heir to Irgun terrorist Menachem Begin:

"Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu's claims about my actions and words are false. What deserves unequivocal condemnation is the killing of over 160 Palestinian protesters in Gaza by Israeli forces since March, including dozens of children. The nation state law sponsored by Netanyahu's government discriminates against Israel's Palestinian minority. I stand with the tens of thousands of Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel demonstrating for equal rights at the weekend in Tel Aviv."

Western 'leaders', accustomed to swooning at Netanyahu's feet, take note.

Daniel Pipes: Jabotinsky Lite

Foaming Islamophobe Daniel Pipes, grand mufti of the US Zionist website, Middle East Forum, recently visited Australia as the guest of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC).

So what did he tell the AIJAC crowd?

Well, here's the gist, taken from his near full-page screed in Murdoch's Weekend Australian:

"The moment is right for fresh thinking to dispatch the old and stale Palestinian-Israeli conflict... I shall propose an entirely different approach to resolve the conflict, a reversion to the strategy of deterrence and victory associated with Zionism's great strategist, Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880 - 1940): Israel should aim not to please its enemies but to defeat them." (All-out Israeli victory vital for peace, 24/3/18)

The obvious point to make at the outset, of course, is to ask: since when has Israel's aim EVER been to please the Palestinians, their fellow Arabs or anyone else for that matter?

But it's Pipes' embrace of Jabotinsky, the father of Zionist Revisionism, that I wish to explore here. (Just to contextualise him, remember that Jabotinsky begat Menachem Begin's terrorist Irgun, which begat, post Nakba, Begin's Herut Party, which, with the election of Begin as Israel's 6th PM (1977-83), begat the Likud Party, led today by Benjamin Netanyahu, whose father was Jabotinsky's secretary.)

Pipes, of course, presents what he euphemistically terms Jabotinsky's "strategy of deterrence and victory" (which terminology I shall return to later) as though it were some great break in Zionist strategy, but as Jabotinsky himself wrote in 1923: "There are no meaningful differences between our 'militarists' and our 'vegetarians'. One [Jabotinsky] prefers an iron wall of Jewish bayonets, the other [Weizmann] proposes an iron wall of British bayonets... but we all applaud, day and night, the iron wall."*

Got it? Zionism is Zionism is Zionism, and we waste our time differentiating between its different strains as though one is somehow more palatable than the other, because, whatever the strain, it is simply incompatible with the idea of Israeli Jews living alongside Palestinian Arabs as full and equal citizens in the same land.

To move on. Here's how Pipes packages Jabotinsky for AIJAC and the readers of The Australian: "To gain Palestinian acceptance [of Israel], Israel must return to its old policy of deterrence, of punishing Palestinians severely when they aggress... That's deterrence. It's more than tough tactics, which Israeli governments already pursue: it means developing consistent policies to break rejectionism and encourage Palestinian acceptance of Israel. It implies a strategy to crush irredentist Palestinian ambitions, to finally end the demonising of Jews and Israel, recognise historic Jewish ties to Jerusalem, normalise relations with Israelis, close the suicide factories and shutter the entire machinery of warfare... it requires Palestinians to suffer the bitter crucible of defeat, with its attendant deprivation, destruction and despair."

Putting to one side Pipes' demonising constructions - Palestinian resistance to occupation, colonisation, and apartheid (aggression); Palestinian refusal to accept Israel's bulldozing of their homes and rights (rejectionism); Palestinian international law-backed critiques of Israel's illegal occupation and behaviour (demonisation) etc  - what Pipes is really saying here is that Palestinians must, in effect, become Zionists - but without, of course,the benefits!

And if his appalling genocidal reference to the Palestinians' need to suffer "deprivation, destruction and despair," as if this is something new for them, weren't bad enough, he actually has the gall to state that "If Palestinian defeat is good for Israel, it is ironically even better for Palestinians, who will finally be liberated from ugly irredentist ambitions, revolutionary rhetoric, and genocidal fantasies," and so free to build their "polity, economy, society and culture."

But it gets worse with this demonisation of the Palestinians as the heirs of the Nazis: "Think of a miniature version of post-1945 Germany." And don't you just love the implications of that word "miniature"!

Jabotinsky, of course, was far more honest than Pipes about Zionism's SETTLER-COLONIAL status than Pipes, and never tried to dress up the fate of the Palestinian Arabs at the hands of the Zionist project: "Zionist colonization... must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue... only under the protection of a force independent of the local population - an iron wall which the native population cannot break through."

You can see why Jabotinsky's actual words are nowhere to be found in Pipes' rendering of Jabotinsky: "Zionist colonization"; "iron wall"; "native population."

And again: "We can talk as much as we want  about our good intentions; but they understand as well as we what is not good for them. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie."

And again: "Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers..."

And again: "Colonization can have only one goal. For the Palestinian Arabs this goal is inadmissible. This is in the nature of things. To change that nature is impossible."

And Pipes, the son of Polish Jews, expects the Palestinians to "recognise historic Jewish ties to Jerusalem"!

But there's more. Integral to Jabotinsky's thinking is that Jordan is also Palestine/ Eretz Israel. Not, of course, that Pipes lets his readers in on that thorny aspect of the master's thought.

[*All Jabotinsky quotes from his essay The Iron Wall (We & the Arabs).]

You Can Run, But You Can't Hide 1

Tomorrow is Nakba Day, marking 69 years since Israeli terror gangs ethnically cleansed 78% of Palestine in 1948, creating, in the process, the Palestinian refugee problem.

Uri Avnery, is a leader of Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc), a former member of the Knesset, a journalist, and, as a member of Menachem Begin's terrorist Irgun in 1948, a creator of the Palestinian refugee problem.

Salman Abu Sitta is a founder of the Palestine Land Society (an organisation concerned with the implementation of the Palestinian Right of Return), and the seminal website palestineremembered.com. He is a Palestinian refugee.

What follows is a 2014-17 correspondence between the two. It was given by Abu Sitta to the Mondoweiss website and posted there on 22/4/17 under the heading 'Why do I not cry out for the right of return?' - an exchange between Uri Avnery and Salman Abu Sitta.

ESSENTIAL READING, I re-post it here in four parts over the next four days:

Salman to Uri 7/5/14:

Dear Uri,

I read with great interest your interview in Haaretz about your rich and eventful life. You have stuck to your principles since the early 50s when you found that the old doctrine was neither workable nor moral.

I remember vividly our chat over dinner in Paris with your kind wife Rachel, bless her soul [at a UN conference on the Palestinian refugees]. You described your early days as a young German by the name of Helmut, when you joined the terrorist organization, the Irgun, and when you, carrying a machine gun on a hilltop at Huleigat (where there is now a war memorial to 'honour' those soldiers) watched the sea of humanity of expelled refugees march towards Gaza by the seashore.

I also told you my story; how I became a refugee without ever seeing a Jew in my life and how I spent years trying to find out who was responsible for my becoming a refugee, by name, face and battalion.

I remember asking you, 'Would you agree to my return to my house if it were up to you?'

You said, emphatically, NO.

I wrote all about this in my memoirs to be published this year in Europe and USA.

I am reminded of a similar story but with a different ending. I refer to Reflections of a Daughter of the '48 Generation' by Dr Tikva Honig-Parnass. It is a moving account of how truth and reality faced her, as a Palmach soldier, with the grave injustice done to Palestinians. Since then she has spent her energy defending their rights, including the Right of Return.

I saw no trace or hint of retraction in your interview of the kind I had hoped for, namely your recognition of the Right of Return, or any atonement for the great sin: the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Would it not be a fitting last station of a long life (and I wish you more of it) for you to stand on hilltops (again) and shout for all to hear, summing up all your life experiences: the refugees must return, we must repent the sin of ethnic cleansing?

Is this too much to ask of a principled man like you to do this? I am not asking on behalf of the Palestinians, because no doubt they WILL return. I am hoping that it will be a crown to your life's achievements in the Israeli milieu.

As I have written repeatedly: The history of the Jews will not be marked any more by the killing of Christ or the Nazi atrocities of WWII, but indelibly by what they have done to the Palestinians, deliberately and constantly, without remorse, regret or remedy, thus reflecting that side of the human spirit which does not learn from history and voids itself of any moral posture.

Best regards,

Salman Abu Sitta

TBC...

Bergin of Beersheba 2

Back to ASPI's Anthony Bergin:

"Two Australian delegations attended the service for the Battle for Beersheba. I was with a group of defence experts who were in Israel to participate in a forum convened by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies. The other delegation of about 50 entrepreneurs, industry representatives and government envoys, led by assistant Minister for Innovation Wyatt Roy, was in Israel to seek inspiration for the Turnbull government's innovation agenda." (Better Israeli defence ties will boost our hi-tech industries, The Australian, 10/11/15)

The Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies (BESA)?

Check out their website: "The Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies advances a realist, conservative, and Zionist agenda in the search for security and peace for Israel." (besacenter.org)

You'll also find a video of Bergin's address on homeland security there, with a straight-faced Bergin telling his Israeli audience that Israel been "fighting terrorism for a lot longer than Australia has."

Hello? Has he never heard of Menachem Begin?

Begin was the Daddy of all Middle Eastern terrorists!

At least ex-foreign minister Krudd, who cracked that tasteless joke in Jerusalem's King David Hotel in 2010 about Begin redesigning the hotel's interior back in 1946, was alive to the fact. (See my 6/12/11 post The Joke.)

But I guess history and irony and all that sort of stuff just aren't Bergin's thing. He's in Israel for other reasons:

"Our exchange on strategic issues soon demonstrated a whole range of areas where our military forces could learn from one another. These ranged from defence industry co-operation (our army has purchased an Israeli battle management system) to counter-insurgency, urban intelligence gathering, coalition warfighting, countering improvised explosive devices, military education, the use of reservists, airpower developments (both countries are acquiring F-35 joint strike fighters), military procurement processes and maritime security (Israel is developing offshore gas fields). Issues related to counter-terrorism and social resilience were highlighted as common interests of both states." (ibid)

Bergin's obviously the sort of bloke who loves things that go *BANG*, and has decided that, in the *BANG* department, Israel is where it's at. And he wants a slice of that (field-tested on Palestinian guinea pigs) action for Australia.

So what?

Here's the bottom line:

To the extent that Bergin's views and advice are embraced by the Australian government, and defence and security ties with Israel, an ethnocratic, apartheid state, are advanced, we can expect a malign process of creeping Israelisation in this country. This will inevitably be characterised by a slackening of support for the role of the United Nations in international affairs; a deepening contempt for international law and norms; an erosion of basic civil liberties; and rampant Islamophobia.

Deconstructing the Carlton/Le Lievre Backlash 1

The confected outrage of Zionist propagandists at Mike Carlton and Glen LeLievre, following their forthright condemnation of Israel's current wilding in Gaza in Saturday's Herald, was as inevitable as night following day.

Five of the 9 letters on the subject in yesterday's Herald were in this category. Here's my deconstruction of one of them - that by Zionist barrister Irving Wallach of Alexandria:

"Journalistic and cartoon comment in coverage of the tragic and extremely disturbing deaths of Palestinian civilians in Gaza..."

Note the feigned concern for Palestinian civilians. It's there merely to lend the requisite air of humanity to the letter. (Rule Number 1 in the Zionist propaganda handbook.)

Readers are not, of course, expected to notice that the term "tragic deaths" is really nothing more than a euphemism for bloody murder, or reflect that if the writer was in fact "extremely disturbed" by them, he'd be condemning them as the war crimes that they are.

"... and of Israeli civilians was always going to need caution."

Although there is, in fact, no balance whatever in Israel's genocidal rampage in Gaza, you'll note here an attempt to suggest otherwise.

"Which makes one wonder how on earth LeLievre's cartoon was approved for publication."

The reader is not, of course, expected to wonder how on earth genuine obscenities such as 'Operation Protective Edge' can be perpetrated by those who spin themselves as the very acme of civilization and modernity.

"His image of a fat hook-nosed Jew..."

Hm... reminiscent of a geriatric Menachem Begin, Israeli terrorist par excellence and Likud founder, of whom Netanyahu has said, "He is a great role model for me... Israel and the Likud are inspired by the spirit of Menachem Begin." (Israel remembers Prime Minister Menachem Begin, israelhayom, 28/2/12)

Seems like LeLievre's captured the 'spirit' of today's Likudnik murderers perfectly. And that reminds me: wasn't Wallach once a leader of the Zionist youth movement Betar, founded by the ideological godfather of the Likud, Vladimir Jabotinsky?

"... complete with religious head covering..."

Such as Netanyahu wears from time to time, to shore up the kippah-wearing settler vote.

"... and labelled with a large Star of David is disgraceful. It should be the stuff of a bygone era."

Apparently the appropriation of the Star of David as the national symbol of the genocidal Israeli apartheid regime is neither here nor there.

"It should not have appeared in the pages of any Australian newspaper, let alone a quality publication such as the Herald. Shame on you, LeLievre, and the Herald."

Bollocks!

Using Force, Rewriting History & Getting Away With It

In an opinion piece in Tuesday's edition of the Sydney Morning Herald, international editor Peter Hartcher concluded his commentary on the the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre as follows:

"As it did 25 years ago in a very different situation, China is using force, rewriting history, and getting away with it." (China muscles its way to power, 3/6/14)

(The present tense is using refers, of course, to the recent sinking of a Vietnamese fishing boat by a Chinese vessel in the South China Sea.)

Whatever this formulation's applicability to China, however, I was struck by how well it summed up Israel's modus operandi: using force, rewriting history, and getting away with it.

Thank you, Mr Hartcher.

But typically, not in a million would Hartcher, rambammed in 2009 and 2011, ever say any such thing about the apartheid state, its long history of murder and mayhem, its false historical narrative, and its Scarlet Pimpernel-like ability to evade censure and sanction.

To take just two recent examples from The Australian Jewish News of history rewritten:

1) A supplement to the AJN last month, Yom Ha'atzmaut (Israel Independence Day) 2014-5774, leads with a two-page spread A journey through history, by Nathan Jeffay.

Essentially a tourism ad, the only history we get here is:

a) that "the modern Jewish state" was established on May 14, 1948.
b) that an attack by Arab armies followed the above.
c) that three "Zionist militias" (the Palmach, the Etzel "paramilitary organisation, also known as the Irgun and commanded by the man who became Israel's 6th Prime Minister, Menachem Begin," and the "hard-line Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang") made this glorious event possible.

What we don't get is any mention of Palestinians or the fact of their ethnic cleansing at the time.  They are completely absent from Jeffay's journey through history.

2) An article by Uri Butnaru, The forgotten refugees, in the AJN of 23/5/14. This begins:

"The decision by the Canadian parliament earlier this year to recognise the refugee status of 850,000 Sephardi Jews forced to leave Arab lands such as Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt and Libya between 1948 and the early 1950s is another small step towards justice. Being the son of an Iraqi Jewish refugee, it gladdens my heart that in a small way the world is starting to understand that there was suffering on both sides of the conflict, sparked by the establishment of Israel in May 1948 - it wasn't just the Palestinians who were dispossessed and displaced. Sephardi Jews from Arab lands had to leave everything behind, their homes and all their possessions. But while not one of the 22 Arab countries that could have taken in the displaced Palestinians did so, for the Sephardi Jews there was one tiny country in the world that welcomed them with open arms."

Butnuru's is, of course, a propaganda piece premised on a false equivalence, namely that both Palestinians and Arab Jews were "refugees," sharing a similar experience and fate (summed by Butnuru as "dispossession and displacement") and that Israel's sole involvement in the matter extended to nothing more than merely "welcom[ing] them with open arms."

A Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) report from March 28, 1950 gives the lie to this:

"Premier David Ben Gurion returned today from his 3-weeks leave and tonight will attend a joint session of the Israel Cabinet and the Jewish Agency executive, called to explore the possibilities of the immigration of Iraqi Jews to Israel after they are permitted to leave Iraq." (Ben Gurion returns from vacation; discusses immigration of Iraqi Jews to Israel, jta.org)

The key word here, of course, is immigration. Broadly, while the Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland by Zionist forces, Arab Jews emigrated from Iraq with more than a little help from Ben Gurion and friends.

Now I could stop here, but let's go on and explore some of the differences between the experiences of Palestinian refugees on the one hand, and Iraqi Jewish emigrants on the other.

Here, for example, is a description of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian port city of Jaffa in late April, 1948, courtesy of our aforementioned Israeli 'paramilitary' chieftain, Menachem Begin:

"Then a strange phenomenon was revealed before our eyes: the mass flight from Jaffa. Arab civilians and a variety of Arab 'fighters' suddenly began to leave in panic. There appear to have been two causes for this epidemic flight. One was the name of their attackers and the repute which propaganda had bestowed on them.* The Beirut correspondent of the United Press cabled that when the first boat-load of refugees arrived there from Jaffa they reported that the information that this attack was being made by the Irgun had thrown the population into a state of abject fear. The second factor was the weight of our bombardment. I do not know exactly how many [mortar] shells we sent into Jaffa. Yigal Yadin, Operations Officer of the Haganah, told me afterwards that we had not been sufficiently economical with our precious shells. The total load was certainly very heavy." (The Revolt: Story of the Irgun,1952, p 363)

[*A veiled reference to the Irgun's Deir Yassin massacre of April 9, 1948.]

Nothing even remotely comparable happened to Iraqi or any other Arab Jewish community.

To stick with the example of Iraq's Jews, news of Zionist atrocities against Palestinian civilians in 1948, the Iraqi army's involvement in the war against a Zionist takeover of Palestine, and the existence in Iraq of an armed Zionist underground, all combined to foster the view that Iraqi Jews constituted a potential 5th column for Israel.

The Iraqi government initially reacted by seizing the property of Iraqi Jews known to be in Israel, and some Jews began leaving Iraq illegally by December 1948. When restrictions on the emigration of Iraqi Jews were lifted in March 1950, a spate of mysterious bombings of Jewish targets in Baghdad followed, leading to a mass emigration, mostly to Israel, from May to August 1950. Evidence points to the work of Zionist terrorists seeking to speed up the process. (See my posts Greg Sheridan: Charmed by Israel's 'Most Dangerous Politician', 21/12/07; Shameless Israeli Propaganda at the WaPo, 3/12/14)

Israel's foreign minister at the time, Moshe Sharett, crowed in a telegram that "[The emigration] is striking vindication persistent and daring efforts of Mossad Ha'Aliyah [underground Zionist movement for encouraging emigration] which in long years of underground work... succeeded creating movement which breathed new spirit into traditionally submissive Iraqi Jewry." (quoted in Jewish Property Claims Against Arab Countries, Michael R. Fischbach, 2008, p 56)

To return to our opening theme: aggression in spades, rewritten history on a grand scale, and getting away with it every time. Israel makes the Chinese look like mere amateurs.

Deir Yassin As You've Never Heard It Before

Today, of course, is the 66th anniversary of the Deir Yassin massacre, the best known of the Zionist massacres which characterised the campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out by Zionist terror gangs in Palestine in 1948. (For an earlier post on Deir Yassin, you can check out my 9/4/12 post Zionism Red in Tooth & Claw. )

Of course, spinning away the Deir Yassin and other massacres is a favourite pastime with our Zionist friends, the prevailing assumption being that Israelis just don't do massacres. Or if they do, the Palestinians provoked them somehow. Generally just by being there. Or, if all else fails, hell, just blame it on the Bossa Nova with its magic spell, OK?

Now in the case of the Deir Yassin massacre, you'd think that maybe Zionist propagandists would at least base their spin on the words of the leader of the Irgun, the Zionist terrorist gang primarily responsible for perpetrating the massacre, Menachem Begin.

In Begin's memoir, The Revolt: Story of the Irgun, the Irgun is alleged to have encountered fierce resistance by "Arab troops," who "suffered casualties three times as heavy" as the attacking force.

"Yet the hostile propaganda," writes Begin, "disseminated throughout the world, deliberately ignored the fact that the civilian population of Deir Yassin was actually given a warning by us before the battle began. One of our tenders carrying a loud speaker was stationed at the entrance to the village and it exhorted in Arabic all women, children and aged to leave their houses and to take shelter on the slope of a hill. By giving this humane warning our fighters threw away the element of complete surprise, and thus increased their own risk in the ensuing battle. A substantial number of the inhabitants obeyed the warning and they were unhurt. A few did not leave their stone houses - perhaps because of the confusion. The fire of the enemy was murderous - to which the number of our casualties bears eloquent testimony. Our men were compelled to fight for every house; to overcome the enemy they used large numbers of hand-grenades. And the civilians who had disregarded our warnings, suffered inevitable casualties." (pp 164-65)

There's the script, OK? Now is it really too much to expect Begin's brats to stick to it, do you think?

Well, apparently, yes it is! It seems Begin didn't know shit about what really went on in the "battle" for Deir Yassin, that is if you're to believe David Meir-Levi. You see:

"A contingent of Iraqi troops had entered Deir Yassin on March 13, 1948... So on April 9, 1948, a contingent of the Irgun... entered the village. However the Iraqis disguised themselves as women - it is easy to hide weapons beneath the flowing robes of the burqa* - and had hidden themselves among women and children in the village. So, when the Irgun fighters entered, they encountered fire from 'women'! When the Irgun fighters fired back, they killed innocent women because the Iraqis were dressed like women and hiding behind them." (Big Lies: Demolishing the Myths of the Propaganda War Against Israel, 2005, frontpagemag.com)

Now that little propaganda primer, published by the David Horowitz Freedom Centre and Students for Academic Freedom, was written for Zionist students on US campuses to aid and abet their eternal struggle for Strewth, Injustice and the Israeli way. As that eminence grise of Zionist campus activism, David Horowitz, has written in its Introduction:

"David Meir-Levi has written a text that restores the memory of the facts that lie at the very heart of the conflict in the Middle East."

What a pity Begin wasn't around to read Big Lies while writing his memoir. Would it not have jogged his memory?

[*I'm not even going there, except to say that the short answer is 'no'.]

Zionist (Wet) Dreaming

I don't know how much more simple-minded commentary on Ariel Sharon in the corporate media I can take. Here, for example, is the concluding paragraph from Jonathan Freedland's obituary (?) in the Guardian online:

"The tragedy for both sides is that the right people to speak that truth [about the Palestinian nakba] were the founding generation. Those who fought the war of 1948 were best placed to close its wounds. An intriguing habit of Sharon's was to refer to places in Israel by their original, Arabic names - thereby acknowledging the truth that usually lies buried beneath the soil. Leading his nation to do the same could have been Ariel Sharon's final mission. They will have to do it without him."  (Ariel Sharon's final mission might well have been peace, 4/1/14)

As if this "intriguing habit" - assuming it ever existed - meant anything more than the fact that Sharon was born and raised in ARAB PALESTINE.

Incredibly, while ms journalists/pundits such as Freedland have no problem spotting war criminals in every other corner of the globe, when it comes to the Israeli variety they go all fey and fall all over themselves in an effort to sanitise the unsanitisable. So here we have Freedland seriously speculating that had Sharon not fallen victim to a stroke in 2006 he'd now be leading an Israeli version of Australia's Sorry movement! Time, as always, to get real:

"Finally in power [in 1977] after 30 years in opposition, the [Israeli] right dreamed of a new map of Israel, and Begin knew how to galvanize the masses with his pioneering speeches. But Likud did not know how to make this map happen. For Sharon, however - a child of Kfar Malal - it wasn't complicated: irrigation systems needed to be set up, roads marked out and houses built. The division of labor was as follows: Begin would speak about the need to increase Israeli settlements... while Sharon would be the contractor. Sharon turned to a new generation of pioneers from Gush Emunim... inspired by the Bible... Ariel shared their love of the land of Israel and the certainty that they were the legitimate owners of the land of their ancestors... From 1977 to 1981 he established more than 60 settlements in Judea-Samaria. Then, in the course of his various later posts - defense, industry and commerce, infrastructure, housing - he reinforced these settlements and increased their number, until they reached 150. Sharon fought against the whole world to strengthen the Jewish presence in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and he did not appreciate it when, years later, those in charge of the settlements preferred Benjamin Netanyahu over him as the right-wing candidate for prime minister." (Ariel Sharon: An Intimate Portrait, Uri Dan, 2006, pp 77-8)

Fantasies like Freedland's do not arise spontaneously of course - they require a process of indoctrination, preferably from one's earliest days. In an obituary on his mother's death, Freedland wrote:

"Whatever view you ultimately take on the Israel-Palestine question, you cannot hope to understand that conflict unless you also understand this... craving for a place the Jews could call their own." (In death - as in life - my mother was rescued by love, The Guardian, 18/5/12)

Swallow the Zionist dogma that "Jews" must have "a place of their own" - preferably in Palestine - and even a butcher and thief like Sharon will come up smelling like roses.  

Yitzhak Shamir, His Gang & Their Nazi Flirtation

This is how Murdoch's Australian spins the newly deceased leader of Israel's infamous Stern Gang. Its sheltered readers could surely do no other than conclude: What a mensch!

"Yitzhak Shamir was a fighter for the Jews long before Israel's creation, an underground leader who led militias against the Arabs and the British. He made no apologies and no compromises - not as an underground fighter, an intelligence agent who hunted Nazis, and as one of Israel's longest-serving prime ministers who refused to bargain for land." (Israel mourns 'brave warrior' Shamir, AP, 2/7/12)

And this is how Fairfax handles him. Dare I say a marked improvement on the above, but grossly deficient nonetheless. Not only is there no mention of the Stern Gang, but take a look at the headline: 

"The man the British Foreign Office once described as 'among the most fanatical terrorist leaders', who went on to become a senior Mossad spy and Israel's second-longest serving prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir has died aged 96. The lifelong hawk and advocate of the aggressive expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, Mr Shamir served as Israel's prime minister from 1983-84, and from 1986-92. He was also foreign minister from 1980-83." (Death of Shamir: Israeli statesman, militant and spy, Ruth Pollard, Sydney Morning Herald, 2/7/12)

These two pieces tell us in microcosm all we really need to know about these two alleged sources of quality journalism. The first, an unabashed apologist for Israeli terrorism and war crimes; the second, a model of self-censorship.

Given their sanitised versions of Yitzhak Shamir's career, you'd never know, for example, that our valiant warrior/militant/statesman was one of the leaders of an outfit (Stern Gang? What Stern Gang?) that once sought an alliance with the Nazis. But you will read, at least in The Australian's account, that he's described as "an intelligence agent who hunted Nazis."

Now when smearing indigenous Palestinian resistance to the Zionist takeover of their homeland, it's a favourite ploy of Zionist propagandists to cite the collaboration of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, with Adolf Hitler. Predictably, however, these same elements are mum on the subject of the Stern Gang's overtures to Mussolini and Hitler during the Second World War (as they are on Zionism's cosy accommodation with the Nazis in general).

Needless to say, given the hold over Western mainstream media opinion and reportage on Palestine by Israel lobbyists, it would be an exercise in futility to expect this particular inconvenient truth to surface in the wash of misleading information currently circulating in the form of reports and obituaries on Shamir's death.*

To remedy this unforgivable dereliction of duty, I've decided to post the final chapter of Lenni Brenner's groundbreaking 1983 study Zionism in the Age of the Dictators in its entirety:

"Until Begin's election victory in 1977, most pro-Zionist historians dismissed Revisionism as the fanatic fringe of Zionism; certainly the more extreme 'Stern Gang', as their enemies called Avraham Stern's Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, were looked upon as of more interest to the psychiatrist than the political scientist. However, opinion toward Begin had to change when he came to power, and when he eventually appointed Yitzhak Shamir as his Foreign Minister it was quietly received, although Shamir had been operations commander of the Stern Gang.

"On the night of 31 August/1 September 1939 the entire command of the Irgun, including Stern, was arrested by the British CID. When he was released, in June 1940, Stern found an entirely new political constellation. Jabotinsky had called off all military operations against the British for the duration of the war. Stern himself was willing to ally himself with the British so long as London would recognise the sovereignty of a Jewish state on both sides of the River Jordan. Until then, the anti-British struggle would have to continue. Jabotinsky knew that nothing would make Britain give the Jews a state in 1940, and he saw the creation of another Jewish Legion with the British Army to be the main task. The two orientations were incompatible and by September 1940 the Irgun was hopelessly split: the majority of both the command and the ranks followed Stern out of the Revisionist movement.

"At birth the new group was at its greatest strength for, as Stern's policies became clearer, the ranks started drifting back into the Irgun or joined the British Army. Stern or 'Yair', as he now called himself, (after Eleazer ben Yair, the commander at Masada during the revolt against Rome) began to define his full objectives. His 18 principles included a Jewish state with its borders as defined in Genesis 15: 18 'from the brook of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates', a 'population exchange', a euphemism for the expulsion of the Arabs and, finally, the building of a Third Temple of Jerusalem. The Stern Group was at this time a bare majority of the military wing of Revisionism but by no means representative of the middle class Jews of Palestine who had backed Jabotinsky. Still less was the fanatic call for a new temple attractive to ordinary Zionists.

"The war and its implications were on everyone's mind and the Stern Gang began to explain their unique position in a series of underground radio broadcasts: 'There is a difference between a persecutor and an enemy. Persecutors have risen against Israel in all generations and in all periods of our diaspora, starting with Haman and ending with Hitler... The source of all our woes is our remaining in exile, and the absence of a homeland and statehood. Therefore, our enemy is the foreigner, the ruler of our land who blocks the return of the people to it. The enemy are the British who conquered the land with our help and who remain here by our leave, and who have betrayed us and placed our brethren in Europe in the hands of the persecutor.'

"Stern turned away from any kind of struggle against Hitler and even began to fantasise about sending a guerilla group to India to help the nationalists there against Britain. He attacked the Revisionists for encouraging Palestinian Jews to join the British Army, where they would be treated as colonial troops, 'even to the point of not being allowed to use the washrooms reserved for European soldiers'. 

"Stern's single-minded belief, that the only solution to the Jewish catastrophe in Europe was the end of British domination of Palestine had a logical conclusion. They could not defeat Britain with their own puny forces, so they looked to her enemies for salvation. They came into contact with an Italian agent in Jerusalem, a Jew who had worked for the British police, and in September 1940 they drew up an agreement whereby Mussolini would recognize a Jewish state in return for Sternist co-ordination with the Italian Army when the country was to be invaded. How seriously either Stern or the Italian agent took these discussions has been debated. Stern feared that the agreement might be part of a British provocation. As a precaution, Stern sent Naftali Lubentschik to Beirut, which was still controlled by Vichy, to negotiate directly with the Axis. Nothing is known of his dealings with either Vichy or the Italians, but in January 1941 Lubentschik met two Germans - Rudolf Rosen and Otto von Hentig, the philo-Zionist, who was then head of the Oriental Department of the German Foreign Office. After the war a copy of the Stern proposal for an alliance between his movement and the Third Reich was discovered in the files of the German Embassy in Turkey. The Ankara document called itself a 'Proposal of the National Military Organisation (Irgun Zvi Leumi) Concerning the Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe and the Participation of the NMO in the War on the side of Germany.' (The Ankara document is dated 11 January 1941. At that point the Sternists still thought of themselves as the 'real' Irgun, and it was only later that they adopted the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel - Lohamei Herut Yisrael - appellation.) In it the Stern Group told the Nazis:

 'The evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe is a precondition for solving the Jewish question; but this can only be made possible and complete through the settlement of these masses in the home of the Jewish people, Palestine, and through the establishment of a Jewish state in its historical boundaries...

 'The NMO, which is well-acquainted with the goodwill of the German Reich government and its authorities towards Zionist activity inside Germany and towards Zionist emigration plans, is of the opinion that:

 1. Common interests could exist between the establishment of a New Order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO.

 2. Cooperation between the new Germany and a renewed volkish-national Hebrium would be possible and

 3. The establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power in the Near East.

 'Proceeding from these considerations, the NMO in Palestine, under the condition the above-mentioned national aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are recognized on the side of the German Reich, offers to actively take part in the war on Germany's side.

 'This offer by the NMO... would be connected to the military training and organizing of Jewish manpower in Europe, under the leadership and command of the NMO. These military units would take part in the fight to conquer Palestine, should such a front be decided upon.

 'The indirect participation of the Israeli freedom movement in the New Order in Europe, already in the preparatory stage, would be linked with a positive-radical solution of the European Jewish problem in conformity with the above-mentioned national aspirations of the Jewish people. This would extraordinarily strengthen the moral basis of the New Order in the eyes of all humanity.' 

"The Sternists again emphasised: 'The NMO is closely related to the totalitarian movements of Europe in its ideology and structure.'

"Lubentschik told von Hentig that if the Nazis were politically unwilling to set up an immediate Zionist state in Palestine, the Sternists would be willing to work temporarily along the lines of the Madagascar Plan. The idea of Jewish colonies on the island had been one of the more exotic notions of the European anti-Semites before the war, and with France's defeat in 1940 the Germans revived the idea as part of their vision of a German empire in Africa. Stern and his movement had debated the Nazi Madagascar scheme and concluded that it should be supported, just as Herzl had initially backed the British offer, in 1903, of a temporary Jewish colony in the Kenya Highlands.

"There was no German follow-up on these incredible propositions, but the Sternists did not lose hope. In December 1941, after the British had taken Lebanon, Stern sent Nathan Yalin-Mor to try to contact the Nazis in neutral Turkey, but he was arrested en route. There were no further attempts to contact the Nazis.

"The Stern plan was always unreal. One of the fundamentals of the German-Italian alliance was that the eastern Mediterranean littoral was to be included in the Italian sphere of influence. Furthermore, on 21 November 1941 Hitler met the Mufti and told him that although Germany could not then openly call for the independence of any of the Arab possessions of the British or French - out of a desire not to antagonise Vichy, which still ran North Africa - when the Germans overran the Caucasus, they would swiftly move down to Palestine and destroy the Zionist settlement.

"There is rather more substance to Stern's own self-perception as a totalitarian. By the late 1930s Stern became one of the ring-leaders of the Revisionist malcontents who saw Jabotinsky as a liberal with moral reservations about Irgun terror against the Arabs. Stern felt that the only salvation for the Jews was to produce their own Zionist form of totalitarianism and make a clean break with Britain which, in any case, had abondoned Zionism with the 1939 White Paper. He had seen the WZO make its own accommodation with Nazism by means of the Ha'avara; he had seen Jabotinsky entangle himself with Italy; and he personally had been intimately involved in the Revisionists' dealings with Polish anti-Semites. However, Stern believed that all of these were only half measures.

"Stern was one of the Revisionists who felt that the Zionists, and the Jews, had betrayed Mussolini and not the reverse. Zionism had to show the Axis that they were serious, by coming into direct military conflict with Britain, so that the totalitarians could see a potential military advantage in allying themselves with Zionism. To win, Stern argued, they had to ally themselves with the fascists and Nazis alike: one could not deal with a Petliura or a Mussolini and then draw back from a Hitler.

"Did Yitzhak Yzertinsky - rabbi Shamir - to use his underground nom de guerre, now the Foreign Minister of Israel, know of his movement's proposed confederation with Adolf Hitler? In recent years the wartime activities of the Stern Gang have been thoroughly researched by one of the youths who joined it in the post-war period, when it was no longer pro-Nazi. Baruch Nadel is absolutely certain that Yzertinsky-Shamir was fully aware of Stern's plan: 'They all knew about it.'

"When Shamir was appointed Foreign Minister, international opinion focused on the fact that Begin had selected the organiser of two famous assassinations: the killing of Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident for the Middle East, on 6 November 1944; and the slaying of Counte Folke Bernadotte, the UN's special Mediator on Palestine, on 17 September 1948. Concern for his terrorist past was allowed to obscure the more grotesque notion that a would-be ally of Adolf Hitler could rise the leadership of the Zionist state. When Begin appointed Shamir, and honoured Stern by having postage stamps issued which bore his portrait, he did it with the full knowledge of their past. There can be no better proof than this that the heritage of Zionist collusion with the Fascists and the Nazis, and the philosophies underlying it, carries through to contemporary Israel." (pp 265-69)

[*Just look at this rubbish from yesterday's obit. in the Herald: "But from his days as a militant in the extreme right-wing Lehi movement before Israel's birth in 1948 Shamir always believed the Jewish state should stretch from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River." Now re-read paragraphs 2 & 3 of Brenner's chapter above.]

Whistling a Happy Tune

"Whenever I feel afraid
I hold my head erect
And whistle a happy tune
So no one will suspect
I'm afraid."
Rodgers & Hammerstein,
The King & I

Some travel writers are so incredibly courageous for going where they go and doing what they do.

Take the Sunday Telegraph's travel editor, Brian Crisp, for example. He recently risked life and limb going to the world's most dangerous place and, against all the odds, he emerged unscathed to tell the harrowing tale. No mother, surely, was ever more thankful for her son's safe return than Brian's:

"Israel is complicated, and not just politically. When we arrived in Tel Aviv, Iran was threatening to launch a nuclear attack against Israel, saying that the Jewish state had no right to exist. Israel's ambassador to the UN asserted that his country would never allow a second Holocaust... To outsiders like me, who have not lived under the threat of war, it is an uncomfortable back story. To my mother, it was a nightmare. Before I left Australia, she organised a family lunch. She wanted photos of us together, perhaps for the last time, she thought. She didn't want me to go to Israel. She couldn't understand why I would go or even want to go." (Wary & wonderful, 10/6/12)

Rabbi Ralph Genende too, is if anything even more fearless, seemingly quite oblivious to the existential dangers of which Brian Crisp is only too aware. Here he is, writing in The Australian Jewish News, about his recent foray into the same ground zero. I did say seemingly oblivious. Because there is one point in his narrative at which I sense the rabbi's need to look away, so terrified is he at the prospect of 'going there' as they say:

"Not far from the shul [of Yemin Moshe] stands the relatively new Begin Museum, which takes you through the life and political contribution of prime minister Menachem Begin. We joined a group of young soldiers who were being guided through the mainly audiovisual displays. Standing with these young men and women, most of them born after his death, one couldn't help but reflect on how Begin had contributed to the identity of this generation. Regardless of what you think of Begin and his politics, he was a crusty, courageous and charismatic leader who helped restore Jewish pride to a post-Holocaust people." (Travel enriches the Jewish soul, 8/6/12)

See what I mean? That regardless of what you think of Begin is a dead give away. Notice how, at the prospect of recalling the King David Hotel, the Deir Yassin and the Sabra & Shatila massacres, to name but the better known ones of Begin's career, the good rabbi resorts to whistling a happy tune - A crusty, courageous & charismatic leader who helped restore Jewish pride to a post-Holocaust people - so no one will suspect he's afraid?

Doing the Time Warp Again

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference on Monday, March 5.

Although beginning with a funny ("I'd like to talk to you about a subject no one has been talking about recently... Iran"), towards the end of his speech a strange thing happened.

The lights suddenly dimmed, flickered and went out for the briefest of moments, and before the assembled AIPACers (who included more than two-thirds of the US Congress!) knew what was happening they had been transported, by some mysterious magic, from Washington DC, 2012 to Auschwitz, 1944!

But stranger still, Netanyahu didn't so much as bat an eyelid! It was as though time travel of this kind was somehow normal for him. No, he just carried on as though nothing had happened:

"As Prime Minister of Israel, I will never let my people live under the shadow of annihilation. Some commentators would have you believe that stopping Iran from getting the bomb is more dangerous than letting Iran have the bomb. They say that a military confrontation with Iran would undermine the efforts already underway, that it would be ineffective, and that it would provoke even more vindictive action by Iran. I've heard these arguments before. In fact, I've read them before. In my desk, I have copies of an exchange of letters between the World Jewish Congress and the US War Department. The year was 1944. The World Jewish Congress implored the American government to bomb Auschwitz. The reply came 5 days later. I want to read it to you: 'Such an operation could be executed only by diverting considerable air support essential to the success of our forces elsewhere... and in any case would be of such doubtful efficacy that it would not warrant the use of our resources...' And here's the most remarkable sentence of all. And I quote: 'Such an effort might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans'. Think about that - 'even more vindictive action' - than the Holocaust."

Seriously now, the man's mad. Bonkers. Loopy as. And yet did this realisation occur to any US congresscreature or government official within earshot?

Back in 1982, after the Israel Offence Forces, under the direction of then Likud prime minister Menachem Begin, had reduced large parts of West Beirut to what one Western diplomat described at the time as "truly a scene from Dante's Inferno," American, and even some Israeli, officials began to question the man's sanity.

Mind you, incredibly, it wasn't so much what the maniac had done, as his justification for it that caused the penny to drop:

"Contemplating the destruction of Beirut, Israel's prime minister sees a historical parallel. In his response to Reagan's birthday cable, Menachem Begin talked about Berlin. 'I did feel as a prime minister empowered to instruct a valiant army facing Berlin where, amongst innocent civilians, Hitler and his henchmen hide in a bunker deep beneath the surface'. A couple of days after the 'Berlin' message reached Washington, some senior US government officials genuinely seemed to question Begin's mental health. Even in Jerusalem, the disturbing thought has occurred to some Israelis that their prime minister is gripped by a 'dark and macabre fantasy'. 'He is now living in a surreal world', said a professor from the Hebrew University. 'Sometimes I think he is fighting the Warsaw ghetto all over again. He sees the PLO as Nazis and Arafat as Hitler in his bunker'. Ze'ev Mankowitz, teacher of holocaust studies in Jerusalem, described the prime minister's message to Reagan as 'a dangerous and delusional analogy'." (Beirut: The liquidation of a city, Robin Wright et al, The Sunday Times, 8/8/82)

Dangerous and delusional?

Yet who in authority today, in the US, in Israel, anywhere, dares say this of Netanyahu? Must Tehran become a scene from Dante's Inferno before anyone speaks out?

If ever proof were needed that we do indeed live in strange times, one need go no further than this month's AIPAC conference, with its preponderance of congressional sycophants, Obama's obscene grovelling and Netanyahu's hysterical rant.

The Joke

The first two episodes of The Promise (SBS1 on Sunday nights) have confirmed my hopes (Looks Promising! 25/11) for Peter Kosminsky's dramatised interweaving of the final years of British mandate rule over Palestine with the current situation in Israeli-occupied Palestine. The quality, sweep, intellectual courage and historical fidelity of this television drama makes it compulsory viewing for anyone interested in understanding why things are as they are in Palestine/Israel today.

In large part, episode 2 focused on the 1946 Zionist terrorist bombing of the British Mandate government's civil and military headquarters in Jerusalem's King David Hotel and the motivation of its Irgun perpetrators - which brings me to the real subject of this post.

Who could have predicted that, 63 years after the event, this particular outrage would become the subject of one of the most tasteless jokes ever made by any Australian politician, and one that, in fact, should figure prominently in any future assessment of the joker's character and fitness to retain office. But I'll come to that later. For some idea of the scale of the Irgun's operation, and hence its potential and actual human cost, against which the gravity of 'The Joke' might be measured, it is necessary to first revisit the massacre in some detail. The following account of the bombing comes from one who was there, a young British officer named Philip Brutton:

"In Tel Aviv [Menachem] Begin's Irgun gang began their operation early on Monday 22 July, while Jerusalem and the author slept. At 05.30 they stole a Jewish taxi and a Jewish truck. They then drove to Jerusalem where at 11.00 they stole a pick-up lorry and loaded it with 7 milk cans, a significant number in Jewish tradition. Then, dressed as Arabs, armed with Sten and Tommy guns, they drove to the King David Hotel at 11.45. They descended the slope to the unguarded entrance, rounded up the stuff and unloaded the explosives packed into the milk cans... (p 44)

"[T]he first - diversionary, as it turned out - bomb exploded [at about 12.20]. The city siren sounded, then the all-clear at 12.31... Then at 12.37 there was a very loud explosion indeed... More than 90 people had just been killed, including 17 Jews, in the Hotel and one terrorist found by the police. The terrorists had, as noted, arrived at the basement of the King David Hotel at 11.45, placing the 7 milk cans containing the explosives along the corridor underneath the government Secretariat offices...

"Two orders had been ignored by the Irgun, the first being that the operation was to take place out of office hours to avoid, hopefully, any loss of life; also a warning must be telephoned in good time. It was, even so, a dangerous, uncertain, unprincipled and ungrateful act against the one country which had gone out of its way, however unfairly to the Arabs and disastrously for its administrators, to help the Zionist cause. It was, too, organized at the highest level of the Yishuv. The planting of the bombs, and consequent planned destruction of government offices, was an extension of the rebellion, undeclared and never admitted, against the Mandatory power. British intelligence, however, was well aware of the existence of X Command and the identity of its chairman, Ben-Gurion. The King David Hotel operation did not have the destruction of documents as a prime objective: they were not filed exclusively there and those removed from the Jewish Agency had been copied. It was a pointless counter-reaction of provocation which backfired. It was also cold-blooded premeditated murder by the Irgun gang. [British PM] Ernest Bevin and the British government were conversant with the Zionist strategy to obtain their state, both from public pronouncements and from decryptanalysis:

1. Calculated use of violence and, when the occasion demanded, denunciation of the violence initiated by X Command or its affiliates.
2. Condemnation of government response, provoked by violence, as being - to use Weizmann's words - a declaration of war against world Jewry.
3. The Arab position to be ignored.
4. American support to be rallied in both political and financial dimensions.

"The government's knowledge of facts, nevertheless, could not provide a solution. If a solution was acceptable to the Jews, it would not be to the Arabs, therefore not to the Mandatory power. Thus, the strategy and tactics of obtaining the end by the means outlined above continued: terrorism - condemnation of terrorism - government reaction - condemnation of this reaction - more terrorism. Neither the ambition to obtain the goal, nor the blood lust which went with it could be either controlled or assuaged.

"No one knew this better than Israel Levi who was in charge of the party which placed the bombs. He connected the timing devices, and also a booby trap, duly announced, to discourage defusing. He and his gang were disturbed by Captain A.D. Mackintosh, Royal Signals, whom they failed to overcome. They then shot him in the stomach. He stumbled towards the staircase and was found by a porter to whom he gave the facts. The porter informed the manager, Hamburger, who told security.

"Thus the Hotel security, alerted through the heroic efforts of the Royal Signals officer, knew at 12.10 that 'an officer had been attacked. Armed Arabs were in the basement'. A security officer then peered through a grill. He was fired at. Irgun withdrew at 12.15. The Hotel alarm bell alerted Jerusalem Police Headquarters. Hotel security fired on the Irgun lorry. It was abandoned. The occupants fled on foot. Two were hit.

"Minutes later, between 12.20 and 12.25, the smaller bomb we heard in the Old City, intended to divert attention and block access to the Hotel, was exploded. At 12.37 the 7 milk cans blew up. The whole south-west corner of the Hotel collapsed; 6 floors and 28 rooms were reduced to rubble. Robert Newton was in his office when the ceiling fell and the wall behind him disappeared. Below was open space; beyond had been the lift shaft, the typists' room and an adjacent office in which a colleague had worked. Everything and everybody had disappeared. The girls in the typing room were buried under the rubble, dead.

"Superintendent K.P. Haddingham had just arrived from Police Headquarters. He was injured and placed on a stretcher. He then saw, with horror, on the wall of the YMCA opposite, the bodies of two middle-aged men, flung by the blast, like plaster, against the stone, their blood streaming in rivulets, their crucified remains splayed and contorted 16 feet above ground, resembling some sick mural, stuccoed and silhouetted in high relief. They were his friends, Postmaster General G. D. Kennedy and Assistant Secretary E.W. Keys, who had been standing at the Secretariat entrance.

"About 15 minutes earlier the first so-called diversionary bomb had been detonated outside a car showroom, owned by a Christian Arab, a few yards from the Hotel. It failed to set off the ancillary devices which would have fired the whole street. The second diversionary bomb failed to explode and was dismantled by the police... It was some diversion. It had been placed north of the Hotel in a nearby street, outside a shop named Deen's Indian Taylor. It contained TNT and inflammable wadding. Four petrol cans were on top.

"Meanwhile, we made our way back to the New City through the deserted, winding ways of the Old and soon passed through a police cordon where the car containing the second so-called diversionary bomb was being searched and the bomb dismantled. We collected the jeep and went to the Hotel. The bar was a shambles of broken glass and blood. The barman told us no one had been killed there, so Rosemary Walsh was safe. Arthur Butler was cut about the knees. Had we been there we would not have been killed, but flying glass can damage more than knees.

"Rosemary's father was buried under the masonry and presumed dead. He was not among those missing who miraculously survived, one of whom was dug out 24 hours later. He shook hands with the High Commissioner and was taken to hospital where he died of shock.

"After lunch we returned to examine the damage, having no idea of the numbers buried, dead, and alive underneath. There was no noise as soldiers and police began the prolonged job of digging into the rubble. The police, in the meantime, had found the two terrorists hit by the Hotel security: one was dead, the other wounded. He was arrested, later tried and hanged. They were the soldati. The capi escaped.

"The warning ordered by X Command, with whom the ultimate responsibility for the outrage rested, was, in practice, ignored. The first warning was given two minutes before the main explosion, and repeated twice afterwards, by which time it was an epilogue...

"In sum: the terrorists fled from the Hotel at 12.15, after being there for half-an-hour, during which time they placed and primed the bombs. The diversionary explosion occurred between 12.20 and 12.25. The first of 3 warning calls was received at 12.35. The main explosion occurred at 12.37: 91 dead, including 41 Arabs, 28 British, 17 Jews and 5 others. Our rendezvous with Rosemary Walsh saved her life. She would otherwise have been in her father's office. Weizmann's cordite had come full circle." (A Captain's Mandate: Palestine 1946-1948, 1996, pp 46-49)

Got the picture? Now for the loose lips. Here, according to he Australian Jewish News of December 17, 2011, is how foreign minister Kevin Rudd began his "keynote address" to an Australia Israel Leadership Forum (AILF) audience in Jerusalem's King David Hotel on December 13, 2010:

"It is an honour to be among Israeli and Australian friends tonight here in Jerusalem, at the King David Hotel. Shimon Peres, Israel's President, who we met earlier today, said some years ago that when you come to the King David, you come not just as a guest, but you come also to a place which has seen almost the complete cast of players across the history of the modern State of Israel, often in this room in which we gather here tonight. From the 1930s, this hotel became the British field headquarters for what was then British Palestine, until Menachem Begin undertook some interior redesign."

That crack, in the context of Rudd's obscenely uncritical embrace of Israel, goes to the heart of the man's character, and, as I've suggested, raises the issue of whether he's fit to represent this country as foreign, or any other, minister.

Equally, it goes to the heart of our corporate media culture, which never really gave it the attention it deserved. None of the ms media's court reporters who accompanied Rudd, or any of its Middle East correspondents (Koutsoukis/Fairfax; Ben Knight/ABC; John Lyons/ News Ltd) queried it, as the Q&A following Rudd's press conference next day with PA foreign minister Riad Malki makes clear.

Rudd barracker and foreign editor of Murdoch's Australian, Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan, managed to simultaneously soft-soap Rudd and whitewash Israeli terrorism when he wrote that there are "times when he seemed to strain just that bit too much to connect with the audience. Rudd was referring to the incident in which Israeli independence activists [!] blew up the hotel. I accept that they were not the equivalent of modern terrorists. [!] But people died in that incident. I don't think such a joke was in good taste, although many in the audience appreciated it." (That's no way to treat a precious friend, Mr Rudd, 16/12/10)

That many in the audience appreciated [the joke] speaks volumes for the moral void inhabited by Rudd's camp followers.

At home, the Sydney Morning Herald editorialist came closest to cottoning on to its significance when he/she called it "a distasteful joke," and asked, "Has Rudd really got it as a diplomat?" (Mid-East peace: a time to speak, 21/12/10).

Further along (May 5, 2011), journalist Brian Toohey, writing at inside.org.au, commented relevantly: "Nor does... Kevin Rudd display a deep concern for human rights. Although Rudd professes to abhor terrorism, this belief wasn't apparent while he was seeking to impress an audience during a speech at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in March [sic] this year. Representing Australia, Rudd said that Menachem Begin 'undertook some interior redesign' at that same hotel. This sick attempt at humour was a reference to how Begin's terrorist group killed 91 people when it blew up the British-occupied hotel in 1946."

But that was it really. No doubt 'The Joke', which should have resulted in lead stories all over, is destined for Orwell's memory hole.

Finally, to round this one off, what about the Zionist response to 'The Joke'? In fact, there was none. The Australian Jewish News wisely kept mum. But, true to form, there's always one in this category who wants his tuppence worth. Someone called David Singer, who blogs at - wait for it - jordanispalestine.blogspot.com, just couldn't contain himself at the Herald's reference to Rudd's "distasteful joke" and its questioning of his diplomatic competence:

"(i) The King David Hotel was the headquarters of the British army - a legitimate target for an attack. (ii) Warnings were given to clear the hotel but were ignored by the British. (iii) The attack was not a 'terrorist bombing' since the civilian population was not deliberately targeted. I would suggest the Herald not worry about Rudd... the Herald needs to worry about its journalists who write such nonsense as this skewed and inaccurate editorial. Maybe in the spirit of openness and transparency being lately espoused by the Herald in its ongoing exclusive releases from WikiLeaks - the Herald might tell us (i) who wrote the editorial (ii) the qualifications of the person writing the editorial (iii) who checked the editorial for its accuracy before publication. At this festive time of goodwill and cheer the Herald has clearly displayed that this editorial is lacking in both." (Hark the Herald devil sings, analyst-network.com, 7/1/11)

Presumably, the Herald editorialist should have endorsed 'The Joke' with a hearty 'Ho, ho, ho, Kevin! What a blast! May you and yours have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

[For the background to Rudd's 'joke' see my posts The Kevin Rudd Road Show 1 (18/12/10) and TKRRS 2 (20/12/10).]

But Who Pulled the Plug?

Note how the Washington Post frames the following report:

"At the remains of an ancient metropolis in southern Israel, archaeologists are piecing together the history of a people remembered chiefly as the bad guys of the Hebrew Bible. The city of Gath... is helping scholars paint a more nuanced portrait of the Philistines, who appear in the biblical story as the perennial enemies of the Israelites. Close to 3 millennia ago, Gath was on the frontier between the Philistines, who occupied the Mediterranean coastal plain, and the Israelites, who controlled the inland hills. The city's most famous resident, according to the Book of Samuel, was Goliath - the giant warrior improbably felled by the young shepherd David and his sling. The Philistines 'are the ultimate other, almost, in the biblical story', said Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University, the achaeologist in charge of the excavation." (At site in Israel, archaeologists seek to sketch the lives of Goliath's countrymen, AP, 8/7/11)

No surprises, really. Israelites, front and centre. Philistines, mere bit players in their triumphal march through history.

Just as the Zionist master narrative dominates Palestine's modern history, so too, in the Israelites and their imagined Israel - the blind obsession of biblical studies - it dominates Palestine's ancient past.

This mutilation of ancient Palestine on the procrustean bed of biblical studies is the subject of an absolute must-read study, Keith W. Whitelam's The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (1996):

"The situation in antiquity as presented by biblical scholarship is remarkably similar to the modern period leading up to the foundation of the modern state of Israel. Scholarship seems to mirror the late 19th century Zionist slogan for Palestine: 'a land without people, for a people without land'. What we have in biblical scholarship from its inception to the present day is the presentation of a land, 'Palestine', without inhabitants, or at the most simply temporary, ephemeral inhabitants, awaiting a people without a land. This has been reinforced by a reading of the biblical traditions and archaeological findings, interpreted on the basis of a prior understanding of a reading of the Bible, which helps to confirm this understanding. The foundation of the modern state has dominated scholarship to such an extent that the retrojection of the nation state into antiquity has provided the vital continuity which helps to justify and legitimize both. The effect has been to deny any continuity or legitimacy to Palestinian history. If there were no Palestinians in antiquity then there could not be a Palestinian history. The notion of continuity is reinforced by the assumption that European civilization, the pinnacle of human achievement, has its roots in this Judeo-Christian tradition. Europe has retrojected the nation state into antiquity in order to discover its own roots while at the same time giving birth to the Zionist movement which has established a 'civilized' state in the alien Orient thereby helping to confirm this continuity in culture and civilization. The irony of this situation is that for the past there is a Palestine but no Palestinians, yet for the present there are Palestinians but no Palestine. The politics of scholarship is brought home by the remark of Menachem Begin in 1969: 'If this is Palestine and not the land of Israel, then you are conquerors and not tillers of the land. You are invaders. If this is Palestine, then it belongs to a people who lived here before you came'. In the scholarship of the past and in the reality of the present, Palestine has become 'the land of Israel' and the history of Israel is the only legitimate subject of study. All else is subsumed in providing background and understanding for the history of ancient Israel which has continuity with the present state and provides the roots and impulse of European civilization." (p 58)

So what actually happened to the ancient Philistines of Gath and other cities?

Of their fate, the Washington Post can speak plainly, albeit exclusively reliant on the Bible:

"The razing of Gath at that time appears to have been the work of the Aramean king Hazael in 830 BC, an incident mentioned in the Book of Kings... In 604 BC, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon invaded and put the Philistines' cities to the sword. There is no remnant of them after that." (At site in Israel...)

Curiously, however, when it comes to more modern times - 1948 to be exact - the Post gets terribly tongue-tied:

"Crusaders arriving from Europe in 1099 built a fortress on the remains of Gath, and later the site became home to an Arab village, Tel el-Safi, which emptied during the war surrounding Israel's creation in 1948. Today Gath is a national park." (ibid)

The inhabitants of ancient Gath were put to the sword and their city razed, but, wonder of wonders, little Tel el-Safi just... emptied.

Ah, but who pulled the plug?

Here's Israeli historian Benny Morris:

"Operation An-Far was unleashed on the night of 8-9 July... The area covered by [Shimon] Avidan's order [to take the large village of Tel as-Safi and... 'to destroy, to kill and to expel refugees encamped in the area, in order to prevent enemy infiltration from the east to this important position'] was overrun during 8-11 July, with most of the village fleeing before the IDF columns reached each village [in the area]. Tel as-Safi was captured in the early morning hours of 9 July. Laying down a barrage of mortar and machine-gun fire, the 51st Battalion approached from the north and west. After taking the tel itself, the IDF fired on the houses down the slope 'increasing the mass flight, which was accompanied by screams of fear...'" (The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2004, p 437)

What the Post should have said was that the people of Tel el-Safi were put to the sword and their village, like hundreds of others at the time, razed.

The Real Julia Gillard

Journalist David Marr's feature on Prime Minister Julia Gillard in today's Sydney Morning Herald is a portrait of the ultimate political careerist. The following extracts deal with her university years in the early 1980s. And take a look at the theme: She wanted to take Palestine out of the Australian Union of Student!

"She was a natural leader. That was never doubted. In the mad world of campus politics, she showed calm good humour, a sharp tongue and a combative streak. But her remarkable career as a student politician - first leading the Students Representative Council at Adelaide University and then heading the Australian Union of Students (AUS) in Melbourne - raised doubts early on about her deeper beliefs. 'It was progressive instincts that led me to get involved in the AUS', she says. But as its first woman president she found herself caught in a bitter partisan divide as she fought for the survival of this once radical body. Though a long time ago, it was a key battle in her career which still colours her political reputation. She wanted to take Palestine out of the AUS. 'When Whitlam brought the troops home, people then went on a mad cat [sic] pursuit of the New Vietnam and decided it was Palestine, completely misunderstanding that what had motivated most Australian youth was conscription. The question of Palestine was never going to be the new Vietnam for Australian students. So the union got more eccentric and irrelevant. I think it was right', she says, 'to draw a line under that'. The Right loathed her for even trying to keep AUS afloat. The Left loathed her for abandoning Palestine. Her pragmatic campaign to shift focus to educational issues - funding, scholarships etc - did not win much traction. She remembers the self-mocking credo of her faction: 'What do we want?' 'Gradual change'. 'When do we want it?' 'In due course'. The year after her term as president, AUS finally collapsed. Three irreconcilable views of Gillard emerged from this brawl, three conflicting images that dog her still: Gillard the leftie, Gillard the sellout, and Gillard the political operator." (The moment of truth, David Marr, Sydney Morning Herald, 14/8/10)

Marr's cliche about the mad world of student politics aside, while the best and the brightest students of the 1980s (and those of the 1970s) were grappling with one of the great moral and political issues of our time - the wiping of Palestine off the map - Gillard (who confides to Marr that "one of my prized possessions still is the prefect's tie that I got in [Unley High]. It was the first leadership position I ever had.") had decided that it was her mission, having captured the leadership of the AUS, to wipe Palestine off its agenda. And why? Because she, the union's head prefect, had decided it was an eccentric and irrelevant issue, that she had to draw a line under it and change focus to educational issues. Whether these are the real reasons, however, is anyones's guess. Whatever, they failed to gain traction, and after her leaving (wrecking?), AUS collapses! What a glorious legacy.

Keep in mind too that Gillard's ascendency in the AUS coincided with the aftermath of Israel's brutal attempt to wipe Lebanon (& the Palestine Liberation Organisation) off the map in 1982. Given Gillard's record above, what's the bet that the brutal Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon awakened not a flicker of concern in head prefect Gillard?

"She also earned a reputation, in some circles, of being a captive of the Zionist lobby. As Prime Minister, Gillard listed 'support for Israel' surprisingly high on the list of fundamentals of Australian foreign policy: only below the US alliance and the war in Afghanistan and above 'focus on our region'. She says, 'I am obviously a supporter of Israel as people would know'. The Prime Minister describes herself as 'not uncritical' of the settlements and a supporter of the two-state solution. But does she have any real, practical hope that two states will emerge? 'I think it's possible', she says and pauses for a long time. 'It's possible, but yeah it's hard. Across my lifetime, we've seen what appeared to be waves of progress which then didn't amount to real change. So I suppose that has instilled in me a sense of how difficult it is and how fixed the positions are'." (ibid)

Gillard did indeed have the reputation of being a captive of the Zionist lobby in those days. So much so that she took sufficient umbrage at being labelled a Zionist collaborator by some on the left that she threatened legal action.* Not, mind you, that the student politician who had proclaimed at the time, "I do not intend to have the tag of 'Zionist' follow me around for the rest of my life," really knew or cared what Zionism was. The above passage suggests someone who, for all her prattle about the virtues of hard work (telling Marr, for example, that "[My parents] taught me the value of hard work"), has obviously never lifted a finger, at any stage in her career, to educate herself on the issue of Palestine. Her every utterance on the subject, as above, smacks of ignorance and boredom.

[*See my 25/7/10 post, Me, A Zionist? How Very Dare You]

One of the ironies in Gillard's career is that she succeeded Labor identity Barry Jones as the member for Lalor in 1998. Jones was a reader and thinker, and took enough of an interest in the Palestine problem to read at least one book on the subject that we know of. In his autobiography, A Thinking Reed (2006), he recalls how "In January 1983 I was co-opted, at short notice, to join a Caucus delegation to Israel, organised by Barry Cohen*, MP for Robertson, underwritten by the Israeli Government and some Melbourne business people [MERC: That's right, rambamming has a long history!] One of the delegation had dropped out at the last minute so Barry invited me... The embassy had invited us to meet Menachem Begin, Prime Minister of Israel, Leader of the Likud, co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize with President Sadat of Egypt and, as a younger man, a member of the Stern Gang [sic]. I had read a powerful book, The Longest War (1982), by Jacobo Timmerman, a courageous Argentinian publisher who survived torture, emigrated to Israel and wrote a tough analysis of human rights abuses against Palestinians. I tackled Begin directly, quoted a few sentences from The Longest War and invited him to comment. Begin shrugged, stretched out his arms and his voice went an octave higher. 'So he's got a pen? So he writes a book? What has that to do with me?' He refused to be drawn on Timmerman." (p 253)

[* "... a close friend so long as I refrained from any criticism, however mild, of Israel." (p 241)]

Unlike Jones, Gillard looks as though she'd rather die than pick up a book for any other reason than to kill time: "And for someone who's regarded as having such a fierce intellect, her library hardly sounds like a heady trip through academia... It's 'airport trash', page turners..." (Spotlight on the redhead, Mike Bruce, couriermail.com.au, 15/12/06)

And just imagine Gillard echoing these views of her predecessor:
"My view of politics has always been universal and historical. I was never attracted to it as the means of climbing the greasy pole or determining the spoils of office. I joined the Labor party out of a deep, but probably naive, commitment to egalitarianism and liberation. I saw the conservative symbol as a mirror in which a voter could see the beneficiary of voting Liberal or National: 'I'm voting for self-interest'. But I saw Labor as the 'other interest' party, and its symbol should have been a pair of binoculars because often the beneficiaries of its policies were remote: Aborigines, prisoners, refugees, famine and victims of disease." (ibid, p 135)
Unthinkable.

The 'R' Word

Words of wisdom from Uri Davis:

"There is no collective guilt. Children are not guilty of the crimes of their parents; Germans in general are not guilty of the crimes of the Nazi occupation of Europe; western Christians in general are not guilty of the genocide of the holocaust; and Europe in general is not guilty of crimes against humanity perpetrated against Jews. Only anti-Jewish racists are guilty of what they did and continue to do to Jews. And, by the same token, children of Zionist settlers in geographical Palestine are also not guilty of the crimes perpetrated by their parents. Responsibility is, however, a different matter. While children of Zionist settlers in geographical Palestine are not collectively guilty of the crimes perpetrated by their parents against the native indigenous Palestinian Arab people, citizens of the State of Israel have a responsibility, a duty, which citizens of other states do not have in the same way, to raise their voices against these crimes, act in defence of the victims of these crimes and work for due reparation, compensation and return of the dispossessed and expelled Palestinian Arabs. This is the case not because children of Zionist settlers are collectively guilty of these crimes, but because these crimes were committed and continue to be committed in their name.' (Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within, 2003, p 12)

Unfortunately, Tal Jabotinsky, great-granddaughter of Zionist revisionist leader, fascist and Likud godfather Vladimir [Ze'ev] Jabotinsky* [1880-1940], just doesn't get the responsibility thing:

"I am very proud of the family I come from, I carry the heritage proudly. I am proud of all my family, including my great-grandfather [Zionist forefather Ze'ev Jabotinsky] and grandfather [Ze'ev's only son], my mother, my father and my siblings. I am here with everything I carry from the Jabotinsky legacy to add to that... Every year there is a special remembrance ceremony. Shimon Peres [and other politicians] are there every year. Politicians and my family are intertwined, it is not a rare thing to pick up the phone and hear one of them - there are a lot of funny stories in my family about that." (A chat with Tal Jabotinsky, new Betar shlicha [Israel representative] in Melbourne, The Australian Jewish News, 7/8/07)

Avindav Begin, grandson of Jabotinsky disciple, Irgun leader and first Likud prime minister of Israel Menachem Begin [1913-1992]**, does:

"'Murderous blood flows in Israeli arteries', says the grandson of former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Avindav Begin, who is also the son of the current Likud Knesset member Benny Begin, refuses to stand during the Israeli national anthem 'Hatikva' and participates in protests against the Apartheid Wall. He does not see himself as a Jew or a Zionist and believes that his grandfather did not make real peace with Egypt. He is also not worried about being the target for rotten eggs after his inflammatory interview with Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot. The newspaper said in a lengthy report: (Avindav) Begin examines the psychological roots of the Jewish-Arab conflict in his new book End of the Conflict, which was published recently in both Hebrew and Arabic. He suggests a radical solution to spare all religious, national and ideological sectors, encouraging everyone to live together as human beings. Despite being brought up in a very nationalistic family, and perhaps for this reason, he did not agree with the theories of his father and grandfather." (Begin's grandson: 'murderous blood flows in Israeli arteries', paltelegraph.com, 13/2/10)

[*See my 12/6/08 post Pemulwuy in Palestine. **As Irgun leader, Begin was responsible for the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre. As Likud PM (1977-1983), he was responsible for Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the Sabra/Shatila massacre.]

A Likud Peace

"[Benjamin Netanyahu] is a hardliner on security. However, when he was prime minister a decade ago, he showed himself, like his Likud predecessor, Menachem Begin, willing to make peace deals involving trading land for peace." (Future unclear as voters go Right, Greg Sheridan, The Australian, 12/2/09)

This is what is known as received wisdom - that only hardline Israeli politicians can sell 'peace' deals to security-conscious Israelis. Hardliners like Menachem Begin, for instance, who traded Egypt's Sinai Peninsula (captured along with the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967) for 'peace' with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat at Camp David in 1979. The Camp David 'peace', it should be remembered, came only after a near successful Egyptian-Syrian attempt to win back their respective territories by force of arms in October 1973. But what sort of peacemaker was Likud hardliner Begin, and what was the nature of the 'peace' hammered out under the auspices of US president Jimmy Carter at Camp David? The following snippets from William B Quandt's Camp David: Peacemaking & Politics (1986) give us a pretty good idea:

Carter set out to achieve a comprehensive peace involving Israel, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). He had declared that "the third ultimate requirement for peace is to deal with the Palestine problem... there has to be a homeland provided for the Palestinian refugees who have suffered for many, many years." (p 48 )

Sadat, however, was not quite as forthcoming as Carter on that score: "His views on the Palestine question were the most puzzling, and the Americans were never quite sure how strongly committed to the Palestinians Sadat was. At this stage, however, he had said nothing to indicate that he was prepared for a separate agreement with Israel that offered nothing to the Palestinians." (p 53)

But even if Sadat and Carter had been on the same wavelength regarding the Palestinians, Israel had the Americans by the short & curlies: "[Foreign minister Moshe] Dayan... replied that it was possible to reach an agreement. Israel could go along with the procedures that Carter and [Secretary of State Cyrus] Vance had outlined. In return, Carter should say that all previous agreements with Israel remained in force and that there would be no imposed settlement and no pressure in the form of cuts in economic or military aid. Israel should be free to object to a Palestinian state, and the US should say that Israel did not have to withdraw to the 1967 lines... Dayan could then tell the American Jews that there was an agreement and they would be happy. But if he was obliged to say that Israel would have to deal with the PLO or a Palestinian state, then there would be screaming in the US and in Israel. Carter saw the thrust of Dayan's remarks and said a confrontation would not be good for Israel either." (p 129)

Carter had got the message: "[National Security advisor Zbigniew] Brzezinski at the time worried about the impression left with the Israelis that the president was susceptible to pressure." (p 131)

"Increasingly, Carter and Sadat seemed to be thinking of an Egyptian-Israeli accord, one only loosely connected to an attempt to negotiate an agreement on the Palestinian question. Sadat focused his comments almost entirely on Sinai, where he insisted on a full withdrawal by Israeli forces. He rarely talked in detail about the West Bank or Gaza, preferring to stress general principles such as nonacquisition of territory by force and the right of the Palestinians to self-determination. He did not strongly support the American attempt to mobilise opinion behind a freeze on settlements and the applicability of UN Resolution 242 [which called for 'Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict'] to all fronts. Carter was therefore left in the awkward position of appearing to be more pro-Arab than Sadat, a politically vulnerable position to say the least. Hence the effort was made to get Sadat to put forward a clear proposal on the West Bank and Gaza. When he proved reluctant to do so, Carter apparently began to conclude that Sadat's real interest was a bilateral Egyptian-Israeli deal. This appraisal was probably accurate... " (p 177)

"Turning to the Israeli position, Carter said that even if Israel was not required to withdraw completely from the West Bank, and even if there was no Palestinian state, Begin would still not show flexibility. He would not stop settlement activity; he would not give up the settlements in Sinai; he would not allow the Sinai settlements to remain under UN or Egyptian protection; he would not agree to withdraw politically from the West Bank even if Israel could retain military outposts; he would not recognise that 242 applied to all fronts; and he would not give the Palestinians the right to choose, at the end of the interim period, whether they wanted to be affiliated with Jordan or Israel or to continue the self-rule arrangements." (p 186)

"... Carter had repeatedly pledged never to cut economic or military aid to Israel as a form of pressure, and he had vowed not to impose an American peace plan. So Begin could anticipate that little more than a verbal disagreement would result if the Camp David talks failed.' (p 208)

"The obvious trade... was to drop reference to withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza in exchange for Israeli willingness to leave the Sinai completely.' (p 236)

"Sadat's foreign minister was later to write: 'In my opinion, Dayan's discussions with Sadat, which lasted less than an hour, was the straw that broke the camel's back and a turning point towards Sadat's involvement in a series of concessions, arriving at the point of total surrender and, in the end, his signing something beyond Israel's most optimistic dreams'." (p 238)

"Dayan suggested that 242 be referred to only with regard to future Jordanian-Israeli peace negotiations. Since in Begin's view King Hussein [of Jordan] had no valid claim to the West Bank... the issue of withdrawal should not arise. For those areas, Begin would agree to only one of 2 possible outcomes: perpetual autonomy or the imposition of Israeli sovereignty at the end of the 5-year transitional period." (p 244)

"[Attorney General Professor] Barak had little support for [Vance's] desire to continue the Camp David talks until the crucial West Bank and Gaza issues could be fully resolved. So his alternative of finding ambiguous language was implicitly accepted. The central idea, worked out between Barak and Vance was to have 2 synchronised sets of negotiations, one involving Jordan and Israel and one involving Israel and the elected representatives of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, joined by Egypt and Jordan. The draft would say that the principles of 242 applied to 'the negotiations' without spelling out what that meant in reality. Egypt and the US could claim that it meant that 242 did apply to the West Bank and Gaza, but Israel would maintain that it applied only to the peace treaty negotiated between Jordan and Israel, where the question of the future of the West Bank and Gaza would not be raised. Few outside observers would have been able to follow the logic of this arcane discussion, but if they had, they would have seen that a basis for future arguments was being laid." (p 244-245)

"In the end, events outside the immediate scope of the Egyptian-Israeli negotiations broke the stalemate. The shah of Iran fell from power in early 1979, and then everyone flinched, Carter most of all. For political and strategic reasons he concluded that he could not let the chance of peace between Egypt and Israel slip away while Iran was caught up in revolution. Even at some risk to his own reputation, he was prepared to once again make a major gamble to reach an agreement. And if Begin could not be moved, then Sadat would have to be." (p 290) And the rest, as they say, is history.

It is worth dwelling on the significance for the Middle East conflict of Sadat's sell-out at Camp David. Egypt's best known journalist Mohamed Heikal reflected: "The October War [of 1973] was a strategic victory for the Arabs. It was almost a tactical victory for the Arab armies, Egyptian and Syrian, which fought the war, but this in the end eluded them owing to miscalculations in the field and America's determination to rescue Israel, whatever the cost. Yet it is a fact that, as 1973 ended, the world was waiting with bated breath to see what this new political and economic giant, the Arab world, would make of its opportunity. Now, as I write, 9 years later, with the war in Lebanon recently ended, the contrast between original hopes and present reality is almost too bitter to contemplate. If it can be said that in 1967 Arab policies were betrayed by Arab arms, it is no less true that in 1973 Arab arms were betrayed by Arab policies. Israel's invasion of Lebanon [1982] revealed to all the Arabs' total impotence - political, military, economic. It was the moment of their greatest humiliation and shame. How Sadat would have reacted to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is impossible to say [Sadat was assassinated in October 1981]. But what is certain is that, by stating categorically in Jerusalem that there would never be another war between Egypt and Israel, he had given a one-sided pledge of non-belligerence of which Israel was to take full advantage. If there had been no such pledge, if Egypt had still been an active element in the Middle East military equation, the Israelis would never have dreamed of committing a hundred thousand troops to the invasion of their northern neighbour. The fact that Sadat's policies had ensured the total and inevitable isolation of Egypt from the rest of the Arab world did more than anything else to give a clear passage for Sharon's tanks on the road to Beirut. Looked at dispassionately, it can be seen that the siege of Beirut was the logical outcome of the Camp David agreements. From the outset it was perfectly clear that Begin knew exactly what he intended these agreements to mean - no Palestinian state, no independent Palestinian entity, and if the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza insisted on claiming to be represented by the PLO, then the PLO would have to be destroyed. The first stage of destruction involved the arrest and expulsion of prominent PLO supporters living under Israeli occupation, seizing land, cutting off water and various other forms of harassment. The second stage took the form of outright war. The Arabs could do nothing to stop Israel because by making a separate peace the state which was the Arab world's natural leader had effectively disarmed all the others as well as itself. The free hand which Sadat gratuitously presented to the Israelis was not exploited by them at the expense of the Palestinians alone; all Arabs east of the Suez Canal thereby became immediately exposed. Lebanon is the most obvious victim, but Syria too has felt the full weight of Israeli weaponry, and even Iraq became the target for the Israeli airforce. Egypt's opting out had a centrifugal effect on all other Arab countries, diverting their attention from what had for long been the dream of unity - however imperfectly understood or pursued, yet a noble and stimulating dream - into barren territorial rivalries, religious conflicts and social strife. The Arab world had become well and truly balkanized." (Autumn of Fury, 1983, pp 284-285)