The Ongoing Nakba

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

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 The database remains unpublished due to political pressure from the US, Israel and some European states.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

Death of a Sheikh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never Forget the Occupied Syrian Golan Heights

Now this:

"Syria has vowed to retake the Golan Heights as Donald Trump's call for the US to recognise the occupied territory as part of Israel elicited strong responses from Russia, Turkey and Iran. The president ended half a century of US foreign policy and broke from post-second world war international consensus that forbids territorial conquest during war with a tweet on Thursday that said it was time 'to fully recognise Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights'. Trump said the territory was 'of critical strategic and security importance to the state of Israel and regional stability'. Israeli troops took the volcanic plateau from Syria in the six-day war in 1967 and later annexed it, moves that were condemned by the UN security council and never internationally recognised." (Trump provokes global anger by recognising Israel's claim to Golan Heights, Oliver Holmes, theguardian.com, 23/3/19)

"Following the Israeli occupation of the #Syrian #Golan in 1967, approx. 95% of the population was forcibly transferred or displaced. The Israeli army then demolished their homes, destroying one city & 340 villages and farms. These were replaced by Israeli agricultural settlements." (Tweet @GolanMarsad, 22//3/19)

(Al-Marsad "monitors and documents violations of international humanitarian rights law and humanitarian law in the Occupied Syrian Golan.")

IOW, the Israelis did to the Syrian population of the Golan in 1967 what they'd already done to the Palestinians in 1948 and 1967 (West Bank). Serial ethnic cleansing.

What Ethnic Cleansing? 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What an exercise in reality inversion is that!

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

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

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

What Ethnic Cleansing? 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continued in my next post...

Great Moments in 'Judeo-Christianity'

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gideon Levy: 'Israel is Set to Commit Horrors'

The next Nakba:

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

Liberal Zionism & the Spirit of Things

In the beginning (of the Zioinist movement) was the word. And the word (in Theodor Herzl's diary for 12 June, 1895) was Genocide: "When we occupy the land... We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border..."

Hence Israel's spiriting of  penniless Palestinians across the borders in 1948... and again (into Jordan) in 1967.

But Gaza, into which Palestinians from across southern Palestine had already been spirited in 1948? What to do with them? Well, the only border to spirit them across was the Egyptian border... into the Sinai Desert.

And how to spirit them there? A re-run of 1948 perhaps? No, that'd be a PR disaster in 1967. Hmmm:

"'Perhaps if we don't give them enough water they won't have a choice, because the orchards will yellow and wither.' That is what Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol said in 1967 about Gaza, as revealed in newly declassified documents from the time. Ofer Aderet of Haaretz reported... about this today... Eshkol, the leftist 'liberal Zionist,' was very willing to send Palestinians to the moon: 'I want them all to go, even if they go to the moon,' he said.

"As is widely known, the standard UN definition of genocide includes 'Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.'

"These newly declassified documents reveal that the genocidal policy was indeed there already in 1967... Indeed, Eshkol was aware in the months after the 1967 war of the 'suffocation and imprisonment' in Gaza in 1967... And he was quite clear about this being an instrument to effect Israeli strategy: '... precisely because of the suffocation and imprisonment there, maybe the Arabs will move from the Gaza Strip,' he said.

"Eshkol was also paraphrasing Herzl, when Eshkol told the cabinet he was 'working on the establishment of a unit or office that will engage in encouraging Arab emigration.' He noted that 'We should deal with this issue quietly, calmly and covertly, and we should work on finding a way for them to emigrate to other countries and not just over the Jordan [River].' [...] (From Liberal Israeli leaders were contemplating genocide in Gaza already in 1967, Jonathan Ofir, mondoweiss.net, 17/11/17)

Gillard's Guru

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

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

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

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

Whether before the Nakba:

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

During the Nakba:

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

Or after the Nakba:

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

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

A most interesting choice of guru this.

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

Indigenous Terminology (Australia & Palestine)

AUSTRALIA - from the document Indigenous Terminology issued recently by the University of NSW (teaching.unsw.edu.au)

More appropriate

Invasion
Colonisation
Occupation

Australia was not settled peacefully, it was invaded, occupied and colonised. Describing the arrival of the Europeans as a 'settlement' attempts to view Australian history from the shores of England rather than the shores of Australia.

Less appropriate

Settlement

The use of the word 'settlement' ignores the reality of Indigenous Australian peoples' lands being stolen from them on the basis of the legal fiction of terra nullius and negates the resistance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The fact that most settlers did not see themselves as invading the country, and that convicts were transported against their will is beside the point. The effects were the same for Indigenous Australian peoples.

PALESTINE - suggested draft for the University of NSW's next Indigenous Terminology guideline

Appropriate

Invasion
Ethnic-cleansing
Colonisation
Occupation

Palestine was not settled peacefully. It was invaded, occupied, colonised, and ethnically-cleansed from 1918 to 1948 by Zionist immigrants under the protection of British bayonets and with the aim of carving out a Jewish state. Those remnants not ethnically cleansed in 1948 - the West Bank and the Gaza Strip - were invaded, ethnically-cleansed, occupied, and colonised from 1967 on.

Not at all appropriate

Return
Redemption
Land of Israel (Eretz Israel)
Terrorism (unless applied to the ethnic-cleansing operations of Zionist forces)

Describing the invasion of Zionist immigrants as a 'return' to, and 'redemption' of, the 'Land of Israel' (Eretz Israel) panders to political Zionist mythology and ignores the settler-colonial reality of the Zionist project in Palestine. Palestine was never, in Zionist terminology, 'a country without a people.' In 1918, 90% of its population were Arabs (Muslims and Christians), and, up to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist terrorists in 1948, they were still a two-thirds majority in their own land. The use of the terms 'return' and 'redemption' ignores the massive Zionist theft of Palestinian homes and lands which followed the ethnic cleansing of 1948, and the Zionist label 'terrorism,' used against the Palestinian Arab people, negates their resistance to Zionist colonisation, a resistance which began in earnest in 1920 and continues to this day. The fact that some Zionist immigrants left their European homes and invaded Palestine in response to anti-Semitic persecution in Europe is beside the point. The effects were the same for the Indigenous Palestinian Arab people.

Over One Million Nakba Refugees

It's Nakba Day, 2015, the day we remember the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Israeli terrorist forces in 1948-49. That's 67 years of dispossession and refusal by the Jewish supremacist state of Israel of the Palestinian refugees' right of return.

The usual figure given for the number driven from their homeland is 750,000, but Palestinian diplomat and academic, Fayez Sayegh (1922-1980), has argued for a far higher figure.

The following excerpt on the subject comes from his 1952 book, The Palestine Refugees:

"To give an accurate estimate of the number of the Palestine refugees has so far proved rather difficult, partly because of the working definition of 'a refugee', which United Nations agencies had to start from, and partly because of the various technical difficulties encountered in the field. Thus Mr John B. Blandford, Jr, Director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWAPRNE), states in his Report to the General Assembly, submitted on September 28, 1951:

'One of the first tasks undertaken by the UNRWAPRNE was to organize a census operation to determine who should and who should not receive relief. In spite of these efforts... it is still not possible to give an absolute figure of the true number of refugees as understood by the working definition of 'a person normally resident in Palestine who has lost his home and his livelihood as a result of the hostilities, and who is in need.' If the object had been to establish the true number of Palestinians now in other countries, the results of the census would have been more accurate, but the Agency's mandate was expressly limited to those 'in need'...'

"The authors of the Memorandum under review [The Arab Refugee Problem. How It Can Be Solved. Proposals submitted to the General Assembly of the United Nations, December 1951], aware of these difficulties, report the results of various estimates made by either United Nations agencies or Israel sources... although they do not commit themselves clearly to the acceptance of any of the estimates, they seem to have accepted the figure of about 700,000 as a safe working estimate...

"Now the actual number of the refugees, although difficult to estimate with accuracy, is nevertheless an objective fact which is subject neither to arbitrary determination nor to a compromise between varying estimates.

"The statistics of UNRWAPRNE constitute a helpful starting-point. According to the latest report, the refugees registered on the Agency's relief rolls numbered 875, 998. It must be remembered, however, that this figure takes into account only those refugees whose status fulfills the three conditions embodied in the working definition enjoined on the Agency - namely, those who (1) are normally resident in Palestine; (2) have lost their homes and their livelihoods as a result of the hostilities; and (3) are in need. But, even allowing liberally for some duplicate registrations and occasional failures to report deaths, these figures fall below the actual number of the Palestinian refugees, inasmuch as the working definition is too restrictive in scope and leaves out of account three categories of bona fide refugees - namely:

1. Those who have lost their livelihood and become destitute, although they have not left their homes - and who therefore do not fall within the strict definition. There are, according to Mr Blandford, approximately 127,000 of this class (67,000 in Jordan and 60,000 in Gaza), although General Kennedy had reported the existence of some 150,000 of them a year earlier.

2. Those displaced Palestinians who have found gainful means of employment in the neighboring Arab countries and who are not destitute or needy. They are no less 'displaced persons', however, than the more needy refugees. Statistics on refugees of this category are not available.

3. Those displaced Palestinians who emigrated to countries outside the Middle East and who therefore - whether needy or not - are not counted by any of the agencies concerned with the refugees.

"It is evident that, when all these categories of refugees are taken into account, the number will be found to exceed one million. In fact, Mr Blandford speaks, in the forward to his last Report, of 'the crushing burden of a million Arab refugees'." (pp 20-22)

Feel the Hate

Commentators couldn't help but reflect on the racism of Netanyahu's election day rally cry on Facebook:

"The right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are coming out in droves to the ballot booths." (Netanyahu surges to 'great victory', Ruth Pollard, Sydney Morning Herald, 19/3/15)

How dare those 'Arabs' (actually the descendents of Palestinians who managed to escape expulsion from their homes and lands in 1948) use the ballot box against us! (And this despite decades of Israeli propagandists exploiting the Israeli 'Arab' right to vote as the sine qua non of Israel's alleged democratic character).

The only surprise, however, is that anyone should be surprised.

Whether it's Zionism's godfather, Theodor Herzl, writing of "spiriting the penniless [Palestinian Arab] population across the border" in his diary in 1895,* or the 1917 Anglo-Zionist Balfour Declaration fantastically dismissing the Arab Muslim/Christian population of Palestine (90% at the time) as Palestine's "existing non-Jewish communities," Zionism has routinely set its face against the presence Palestine's indigenous sons and daughters, ignoring, denying, confining, repressing or, circumstances permitting, driving them off their land and into exile as in 1948 and 1967.

In brief, Zionist settler-colonialism abhors the very existence of these people, casting them as an existential, even demonic ('Hamas death cult') threat to its control of their native homeland.

Which brings me to the subject of this post, Zionist hate speech. The term hate speech, of course, is one Zionist propagandists have made peculiarly their own, using it to describe practically any and every manifestation of anti-Israeli/anti-Zionist reaction to the crimes of the Zionist project in or beyond Palestine. Meanwhile, the fact that Zionists themselves indulge in hate speech, particularly but not always against the Palestinians, is insufficiently regarded. 

Keeping in mind The International Covenant on Civil & Political Rights (ICCPR) definition of hate speech, namely, "any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence," tell me if the following - hosted at the jwire.com.au website - doesn't fit the definition:

"At the beginning of the 20th Century, if one were referred to as a Palestinian, it was automatically implied that he or she was Jewish. Decades later Arabs cleverly commandeered the term 'Palestinian' and fools the world over, including Jewish fools, have bought the propaganda that 'Palestinians' have never forgiven the division of their 'country' by the UN. If there was such a country, who were its rulers, what was its currency, the questions are endless, but no one poses these types of questions to the Palestinian Authority.

"The facts are that there was no country called Palestine.

"Simply put, Palestine was a land mass administered finally by the British until the 1947 Partition Plan when only a part was allocated back to its century's [sic] old rightful owners, the Jewish people.

"Successive Israeli governments have never once opened their mouth [sic] in a convincing way to debunk the entire 'Palestinian' narrative and in the process appear to have discarded the Jewish heritage of the Temple Mount.

"So much for the profound: 'If I forget thee, O Jerusalem.'

"Does no one see the consequences of this tragic situation?

"It is time for Israel to act like a sovereign power in control of its own destiny and take unilateral action on many fronts, including the reclaiming of the Temple Mount before it is lost forever.

"In short, it is time for the gloves to finally come off." (The unfolding tragedy that is the Temple Mount, Gil Solomon, 15/3/15)

Some of Solomon's readers were sufficiently incited to comment as follows:

"I stood right at the entrance of the Dome of the Rock and prayed it would be demolished and the Temple rebuilt."

"You have, in the past, accused me, Gil, of 'touchy, feely' political views - well, sit back because it's just a matter of a few short years and Netanyahu and his people will be sitting pretty on land rightfully theirs."

"I most strongly object to the international community which demands that Jews share their land with a pretend people, saying not a word when those same aggressive, callous, lying pack of pretenders refuses to share a site holy to Jews and significant to mohammedans only on an interpretation of a dream."

You can feel the hate.

For another recent example of this kind of bile - appearing in The Australian Jewish News - see my 8/7/14 post Settler Haters Hate.

[*See my 4/1/13 post What Would Herzl Do?]

An Anti-Semite's Dream Jews

Israeli journalist Amira Hass reports on the progress of the Israeli master plan for the ethnic cleansing of Hebron:

"The sickest imagination of present-day anti-Semites cannot compete with the handiwork of Israel and its emissaries the settlers in Hebron for the past 20 years. The demand for the Jewish return is broken down here into all its raw components: the expulsion of the Palestinians, the destruction of their homes and cultural legacy, destruction of the economy, extreme ethnic-spatial separation and deranged prohibitions regarding movement and housing, attacks in the name of the Torah, harassment and denial of the other. If gentile foes were to say that's how Jews behave, the institutes for the study of anti-Semitism would sound the alarm.

"Today, February 25, is the 21st anniversary of the massacre perpetrated by Dr Baruch Goldstein against worshipers in the Ibrahimi Mosque (the Cave of the Patriarchs). The prime minister and defence minister at the time, Yitzhak Rabin, could have dismantled the nuclear bombs stored by his colleagues from Mapai (the forerunner of Labor) in the late 1960s - Yigal Alon and Moshe Dayan - when they allowed groups of messianic Jews to settle there and encouraged them by providing military protection and weapons. The evacuation of the settlers from Hebron would have been received with great understanding in 1994. But Rabin decided to continue with the traditional policy, which was natural for Mapai, of pampering the settlers, and instructed the army to punish the Palestinians for the massacre committed against them by a Jewish doctor - an immigrant from the United States - with a prolonged curfew, restrictions on movement, the closing of shops and marketplaces, and criminal forgiveness for the violence of the settlers. Since then Israel has continued with its policy of punishing those who are attacked.

"Twenty-one years after the massacre, the settlers in Hebron have many reasons for celebration. President Reuven Rivlin visited them and gave his approval for the evaporation of the Palestinian community from the center of Hebron. Last week a second representative of the Hebron settlers entered the Knesset, instead of the late Uri Orbach: Rabbi Hillel Horowitz of Habayit Hayehudi, who is joining his colleague and neighbour Orit Strock. And even if it's only symbolic and for a month or two, there's a chance that another of their neighbors, Baruch Mazel, who lives in the settlement of Tel Rumeida, will preserve the handsome quota in the next Knesset: two elected officials from a community of several hundred people who have orchestrated one of the most violent and racist realities.

"The Hebron settlers can be credited with several more accomplishments achieved in the past 3 years: another new promenade connecting Kiryat Arba and the Cave of the Patriarchs, an expanded Beit Romano, an archaeological park under construction, the Cave of the Patriarchs as a national heritage site, tours by school students, and the main thing - a first settlement site in Hebron in 30 years in 'Beit Hameriva' (the house of contention) in the heart of the ar-Ras neighborhood, after the Supreme Court confirmed that it was purchased legally.

"And among the achievements and festivities, the center of the city is deserted and in ruins. You have to visit there, repeatedly, in order to begin to understand not only how it looks when 120 blockades and checkpoints cut off abandoned streets in the middle, and how it is when young soldiers enforce the prohibition against visiting the family that insists on continuing to live in its home or walk in the street that's for Jews only, and how the elderly climb up the incline short of breath, because Palestinian cars are not allowed there. The visit is necessary in order to understand this all-Israeli creation: Active and conscious assistance of Labor governments, and conscious support, indifference and the emotional and intellectual laziness of elites and ordinary people, have implemented the most extremist settlement-oriented-messianic-right-wing master plan since 1948." (Israel's Hebron handiwork: Its most heinous endeavor since 1948, Haaretz, 25/2/15)

Arab East Jerusalem's Israeli Nightmare

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine never stops:

"On Wednesday evening, Abdel Rahman ash-Shaludi, 21, drove his vehicle at high speed into a crowd of Israelis on a light rail platform at Ammunition Hill in Jerusalem, wounding 8 people. 3-month-old Israeli-American Chaya Zissel Braun died hours later, and Karen Yemima Muscara, an Ecuadorian woman in her 20s, died from her injuries last night.*

"As Shaludi attempted to run away, he was shot by an Israeli security guard. In a video, the guard stood over the mortally wounded Shaludi, pointed a gun in his face at point-blank range and taunted, 'Do you want it?'

"That night, Mohammad Mahmoud of the Addameer Prisoner Support & Human Rights Association was prevented by the army from visiting Shaludi in the hospital. He died hours later. As a result of the army banning visitors to the hospital as Shaludi lay dying, Israel prevented any psychological evaluation or statements that could reveal the nature of the incident. This move ensured that nothing would surface that could derail the impending media frenzy.

"Immediately, Israeli media branded the incident a terrorist attack and declared Shaludi was a Hamas operative with a history of terrorism. Yet according to prior Israeli investigations and statements from his family, he was not affiliated with Hamas. Shaludi had spent 14 months in Israel prisons for stone-throwing - not exactly an act of a mastermind terrorist. He was released in December of 2013, arrested again in February and held for 20 days by Israeli interrogators.

"'They kept on harassing him and summoning him for questioning over and over again and they tried to enlist him into working for them, but he repeatedly refused,' his mother told Ma'an News. 'They threatened him, saying he would never find work or be able to continue his education or have a normal life,' she added.

"According to the Shaludi family, he was brutally tortured in prison and suffered severe trauma as a result. Only hours before the incident, his mother had taken him to 'a doctor who advised him to see a therapist after days of exhibiting signs of mental exhaustion.'

"Over the years, Shaludi's East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan has come under attack by Israeli authorities and settlers. Just 3 days before the incident, fanatical Israeli settlers moved into homes in the middle of the night, doubling their presence in the neighborhood.

"For the Israeli public, the possibility that the incident resulted in from severe psychological trauma from torture in Israeli gulags, as well as attacks on Shaludi's neighborhood is inconceivable. Admission of this possibility could implicate Israel's brutal security apparatus in the death of baby Chaya. Besides, insanity is only applicable to whitewash the crimes of Jewish Israelis like Yosef Chaim Ben David, the settler who, with two teenagers, beat Mohammed Abu Khdeir with a wrench before forcing the Palestinian teenager to drink gasoline and burning him alive as revenge for the deaths of the 3 Israeli teenagers this summer.

"The immediate branding of the incident as a Hamas terrorist operation alleviated any potential responsibility from public consciousness. As the news of a terrorist attack spread, the Israeli public demanded the Netanyahu government punish East Jerusalem Palestinians. An op-ed appeared in Haaretz that called for an increased police presence in Jerusalem, signaling consensus from left to right.

"Israel's campaign of escalation and collective punishment began. While visiting the grieving family of Chaya Zissel Braun, Minister of Internal Security Yitzhak Aharonovich announced that he would seal or demolish the Silwan home of the bereaved Shaludi family. Two days later, in an act of provocation, Minister of Housing and Construction Uri Ariel,** announced that he planned to move into Silwan. This morning, Netanyahu announced that 1,000 new homes would be constructed in East Jerusalem, a move that increases pressure on Palestinians.

"The day after the incident, Netanyahu convened with Aharonovich, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barakat, Shin Bet Head Yoram Cohen, and police officials ordering 1,000 more police and troops from the border police, instructing them to 'exercise Israeli sovereignty' over the occupied territory.

"The police carried out Netanyahu's orders with brute force. As a crowd of 150 Israelis gathered at the site of the incident, calling for expulsions of Palestinians, and chanting 'Death to Arabs' and 'revenge', soldiers, police and settlers mounted attacks on neighborhoods throughout East Jerusalem. In Silwan, soldiers ransacked the Shaludi home and arrested family members including Abdel Rahman's 15-year-old brother Izzedin. Settlers threw stones at homes, cars and property and attacked several Palestinians. Fatimah Rajabi, 11, and her 4-year-old cousin Wael were shot in the face while in their home by Israeli soldiers firing rubber-coated bullets.

"In an attempt to expand martial law that Palestinians live under in the occupied West Bank, Jerusalem police officials are considering legislation that would hold parents liable for the acts of their children.

"As the Israeli government ramped up its attacks on East Jerusalem, it simultaneously recruited Western governments to internationally legitimize the assault. 'The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms today's terrorist attacks in Jerusalem,' US State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki said in a released statement. The UK and France followed suit and released statements condemning the apparent attack. Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Ron Prosor called on the UN Security Council to condemn the incident as a 'terrorist' attack.

"This episode illustrates how anti-Arab racism in Israeli society - what Israeli President Reuben Rivlin recently called 'sick' - makes it susceptible to manipulation of facts in order to advance the far right's agenda. Though the secular elite in Tel Aviv may appear to be ambivalent to the religious settler movement's aspirations to completely Judaize Jerusalem, they practically support it in the name of security measures and counter-terrorism.

"Under the pretext of restoring quiet, the Netanyahu government is escalating Israel's war on Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Led by Moshe Feiglin, the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset who has called for genocide of the Palestinians, extremist settlers escorted by armed police have increasingly been visiting the courtyard surrounding the al-Aqsa Mosque - a site of huge importance in Islam. Police have attacked Palestinian worshippers on a near daily basis, and in a move that could ignite an intifada, Israeli lawmakers will soon vote on partitioning the mosque. As Netanyahu incites Israelis and ramps up attacks on Palestinian neighborhoods, the future of Jerusalem is anything but quiet." (Under pretext of restoring calm, Netanyahu government is escalating Israel's war on Palestinians in Jerusalem, Dan Cohen, mondoweiss.net, 27/10/14)

[*See my 25/10 post What's Fit to Print in The Australian; **See my 18/5/14 post Our Klutz in... East Jerusalem.]

Nothing New Under the Sun

The day Islamic State forces came to the Yazidi village of Kocho:

"On the morning of Friday 15 August [2014] the nightmare that had haunted the residents of Kocho for the previous 12 days came to pass, when IS fighters killed at least a hundred... of the village's men and boys and abducted all the women and children... Survivors of the massacre told Amnesty International that the IS fighters assembled the village residents at the secondary school... where they separated men and boys from women and younger children. The men were bundled into pick-up vehicles... and driven away to different nearby locations, where they were shot." (Ethnic cleansing on a historic scale: Islamic State's systematic targeting of minorities in northern Iraq, Amnesty International, 2014)

The day Jewish State forces came to the Palestinian village of Dawayma:

"One of the worst but best-documented massacres during the offensive took place at Dawayma [on October 28, 1948]. The town was taken by a company of the 89th Commando Battalion which was composed of former Irgun and Stern Gang terrorists. A veteran of the unit has published an account of the massacre. He notes that in order 'to kill the children they fractured their heads with sticks. There was not one house without corpses.' After murdering the children, the Jewish soldiers herded the women and men into houses where they were kept without food or water. Then the houses were blown up with the helpless civilians inside. The Israelis were particularly sadistic in their treatment of Arab women. One Zionist soldier in Dawayma 'prided himself upon having raped an Arab woman before shooting her to death. Another Arab woman with her newborn baby was made to clean the place for a couple of days and then they shot her and her baby.' The conscience-stricken Israeli veteran who revealed these events stressed that they were committed by 'Educated and well-mannered commanders who were considered 'good guys'.' They became 'base murderers and this was not in the storm of battle but as a method of expulsion and extermination. The fewer the Arabs who remained, the better'." (The Palestinian Catastrophe: The 1948 Expulsion of a People from their Homeland, Michael Palumbo, 1987, p xii)

Our Man in Tel Aviv 3

Dave Sharma is Australia's new ambassador to Israel. Or should that be Israel's ambassador to Australia?

While other Australian diplomats quietly attend to the myriad needs of Australians abroad, Sharma's busy blowing Israel's trumpet in the Murdoch press, celebrating its latest PR stunt, the treatment of a handful of Syrian refugees in an Israeli hospital. A sample:

"Ziv Hospital is a profound example of humanity and decency at its most compelling. It is Israel at its very best, and a side of Israel that the world too rarely acknowledges." (Origin no bar to Israel lifesavers, The Australian, 31/8/13)

(For a more liberal serving of same see my 3/9/13 post Our Man in Tel Aviv 2.)

Now was it Dave Sharma or one of his underlings who was on hand to witness the following example of Israel's "humanity and decency at its most compelling"?

"Khirbet Al-Makhul, West Bank: Israeli soldiers manhandled European diplomats on Friday and seized a truck full of tents and emergency aid they had been trying to deliver to Palestinians whose homes were demolished this week.

"A Reuters reporter saw soldiers throw sound grenades at a group of diplomats, aid workers and locals in the occupied West Bank, and yank a French diplomat out of the truck before driving away with its contents. 'They dragged me out of the truck and forced me to the ground with no regard for my diplomatic immunity,' French diplomat Marion Castaing said. 'This is how international law is being respected here,' she said, covered with dust...

"Locals said Khirbet Al-Makhul was home to about 120 people. The army demolished their ramshackle houses, stables and a kindergarten on Monday after Israel's high court ruled that they did not have proper building permits... Israeli soldiers stopped the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delivering emergency aid on Tuesday... Diplomats from France, Britain, Spain, Ireland, Australia and the European Union's political office, turned up on Friday with more supplies. As soon as they arrived, about a dozen Israeli army jeeps converged on them, and soldiers told them not to unload their truck.

"'It's shocking and outrageous. We will report these actions to our governments,' said one EU diplomat... '(Our presence here) is a clear matter of international humanitarian law. By the Geneva Convention, an occupying power needs to see to the needs of people under occupation. These people aren't being protected,' he said...

"The UN office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a statement that Makhul was the third Bedouin community to be demolished by the Israelis in the West Bank and adjacent Jerusalem municipality since August." (Israeli forces manhandle EU diplomats, seize West Bank aid, Reuters/Sydney Morning Herald, 21/9/13)

Whoever it was, he/she was remarkably short of words this time around. As Fairfax's Middle East correspondent Ruth Pollard wrote, in an appendage to the Reuters report: "A spokesman from the Australian Embassy in Israel said the embassy was 'looking into' the incident."

I for one won't be holding my breath for an opinion piece in the corporate press by ambassador Sharma addressing this, the latest example of Israeli ethnic cleansing in occupied Palestine. Nor, for that matter, for a word of protest from our new foreign minister, Julie Bishop.

The Hounding of Jake Lynch

The bullying and intimidation of Jake Lynch goes on:

"An Israeli civil rights group has launched legal action against Jake Lynch, the head of the University of Sydney's Centre for Peace & Conflict Studies, in the Human Rights Commission, alleging his support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement contravenes the Racial Discrimination Act. Associate Professor Lynch last year refused to assist Dan Avnon, the author of the only joint civics curriculum for Jewish and Arab school students*, to undertake work at the university as a representative of an Israeli institution... The Shurat HaDin complaint is based on Section 9 of the 1975 Race [sic] Discrimination Act. It reads: 'It is unlawful for a person to do any act involving a distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of any human right or fundamental freedom in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life'." (Professor faces legal action on BDS stand, Christian Kerr, The Australian, 2/8/13)

(*Kerr, of course, can't even tell the story straight: it's a civics curriculum for joint Jewish/Arab schools, not the other way round.)

While Mr Avnon was no doubt completely shattered by the experience (as only an Israeli can be?), it should always be kept in mind that when it comes to dishing out "distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour (who knows?), descent or national or ethnic origin," the apartheid, 'Jewish' state of Israel, of which his university is an integral part, is second to none.

Even a simple scan of the blurb for his 2009 book, Plurality & Citizenship in Israel: Moving Beyond the Jewish/Palestinian Divide, reveals that Israel's Palestinian minority experiences "unequal access to citizenship; unequal access to land; discrimination in access to public services; insufficient defence of minority rights in Israel's legal system; unequal obligations; [and] unequal economic opportunities." And while we're at it, name me one other country in the world which bases its immigration policy solely on biology?

One wonders, therefore, why such a "civil rights group" as Shurat HaDin, modelled, so Kerr tells us, "on the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Centre, that has successfully used US courts to target the Ku Klux Klan," needs to come all the way to Australia to bother one of this country's most ethical academics. Could there possibly be some other reason? Just asking. 

But back to the matter of difference, exclusion or preference based on national/ethnic origin and the Israeli apartheid state. Whilst pottering around on the internet recently, this particularly egregious example, of which I was hitherto completely unaware, really had me sitting up and taking notice:

"In May of 1948, the State of Israel was established as the modern nation-state of the Jewish people. That November, a state agency, the 'Central Bureau of Statistics' (CBS), conducted the first population census, at the height of the War of Independence [sic: ethnic cleansing of Palestine]. Under a curfew of 7 hours, military and security personnel proceeded to canvass every Israeli household and register all its citizens. An order was given specifying that those absent from their homes would not be registered as citizens and that their ownership of goods, property and land was not to be recognized. Though the order was formulated in universalistic terms, applying to all inhabitants, its sanctions were in effect applied only to the Palestinian Arab population, for it was only members of this group who were not at home. Hundreds of thousands had fled and had been driven from their homes during the fighting [sic: ethnic cleansing]. While the census was ostensibly an enumeration of all residents, it in fact created the population that it was counting. Those who were not counted were thereby excluded from the target population, their rights forfeited. This included not only the refugees who had left the territory under Israel's control, but internal refugees as well. Of those absent during the census, many were internal refugees, remaining within the territory that eventually became Israel's... Though this group was given Israeli citizenship, their property rights were never restored, and they became the statistical category of 'present-absentees'." (The Uncounted: Citizenship & Exclusion in the Israeli Census of 1948, Anat Leibler & Daniel Breslau, sts-biu.org)

Only in Israel.

How Green Was Their Valley 2

"Indeed, the central problem for the Zionists was that all the fertile land was already being cultivated, by people who were not prepared to part with it. Like all native people the land for them was an integral part of the cycle of life. That was the way it had always been and not until the Zionists arrived had they had to face life without it. It was the latifundistas living outside Palestine and the middlemen who negotiated the deals who gave the Zionists their foothold. Once the contracts were signed they drove the tenant cultivators away.* There was no remorse: where these uprooted people went was none of their business. The British, in charge of this supposedly 'sacred trust of civilisation', as the mandate was described in article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, were complicit in this ruthless process, providing an umbrella of armed and pseudo-legal protection. [*See my22/4/10 post Perennial Terrorism.]

"Through legal purchase the Zionists were never going to get what they wanted. By 1945 they had acquired less than 6% of Palestine and remained a one-third minority of the population despite the massive immigration of the 1930s. David Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders knew that only war would give them what they wanted. They played a crafty game, dumping the British when they were no longer of any use and turning to the United States. Partition was a complete violation of the natural rights of the indigenous people but was welcomed by the Zionists, naturally, as they were being given what they did not possess and had no right to possess. At the same time as pretending to be satisfied with partition, they regarded it only as the first step. It was not just that the Americans had concluded by early 1948 that Palestine could not be partitioned peacefully. The Zionists would never allow it to be partitioned peacefully as this would leave the Palestinians on their land. There could be no Jewish state as long as they stayed, and if there is a regret in the Benny Morris school of historical reflection it is only that the opportunity was lost to get rid of them all.

"In the meantime land hunger focused settler eyes on possibilities in the rich, fertile and well-watered Huleh valley. Draining what were called the swamps of Huleh would create more room for colonization but for the time being remained beyond their technical and financial means. When it happened it was inscribed as one of the founding myths of Zionists: the redemption of the land, making the desert bloom, and all the rest of it, when in fact the settlers ruined in the Huleh valley what was an ecologically rich wetland with few parallels in the Middle East.

"From the beginning control of water was essential to the Zionist project. Weizmann fought hard at the Paris peace conference in 1919 for the Syrian headlands of Palestine's water to be included in the British mandate and therefore within the borders of the Zionist state Lloyd-George, Balfour and Churchill wanted to establish in the heart of the Middle East while talking endlessly about nothing more than a 'national home' for the Jewish people. Weizmann's scheming and lobbying broke against the rock of French strategic interest but seizing and controlling water resources in and around Palestine remained a prime target of the Zionist leadership, with their diversion of these waters creating one of the many crises that preceded the 1967 war.

"The Huleh valley stood out from the beginning of Zionist settlement. The first colony in the valley was established in the 1880s but because of the ravages of malaria no further settlements were established for half a century. In the 1930s, Steimatzky's Palestine Guide noted the drainage of 'swamps and marshes' since the First World War, ending the scourge of malaria and restoring 'fertile tracts of land to cultivation thus increasing the tillable area of Palestine'. Unique amongst Palestine's network of rivers, lakes and subterranean aquifers, the Huleh wetlands 'which are now marshy tracts offer untold opportunities for agricultural development. Thorough drainage is the first need, to be followed by systematic irrigation. This land has been granted for use under a concession to a group which did not avail itself of the concession. The concession has now passed to a Jewish group which will soon start on the preliminary work'. (p xii)

"In his collection of essays on land acquisition in Palestine, Arthur Ruppin, a German lawyer who settled in Jaffa as the chief land purchasing and development officer for the Palestine Office of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), lists the Huleh wetland as land which might be uncultivable for the Palestinian settled and nomad population but which would be cultivable for incoming Jewish colons, given their access to credit and use of modern farm machinery.* The fertile land around the lake was either state land from Ottoman times or already owned and cultivated, with only one Zionist settlement having been established up to the outbreak of the Second World War. Ruppin wanted to open up land for settlement by draining the wetlands, which were for him no more than marsh and swamp waiting to be reclaimed.  (*Three Decades of Palestine, 1936, pp 207-208)

"In a memorandum handed to Sir John Hope-Simpson, sent to Palestine in 1930 to investigate immigration, land development and settlement, three major causes of rising distress amongst the Palestinians, Ruppin attempted to show that 'if the farming of the fellaheen were to be a little bit intensified - in the coastal zone, Beisan, Huleh and the lower Jordan Valley - the Jews would be able to buy 1,300,000 dunums without displacing the people who have so far [sic] worked the land. Fifty-five thousand [Jewish] families could be settled on this land.'* Hope-Simpson demurred on various grounds, one of them being that the Jewish National Fund (JNF) would not let 'Arabs' work on its land and that and that 'increasing land purchases will displace the Arabs from many parts of Palestine.' This in fact is what happened as part of a process Hope-Simpson described as the 'extra-territorialisation' of land once purchased by the JNF and put beyond purchase or rental by non-Jews forever. Zionist colonists who still used the Palestinians on the land or in workshops and factories were violating the Jewish-only labor 'principles' that were the corollary of the 'princples' governing land purchase.  (*Alex Bein, ed, Arthur Ruppin: Memoirs, Diaries, Letters, 1971)

"At the age of 50 Ruppin and others founded the Brit Shalom movement. It was committed to 'Jewish-Arab' friendship but the refusal of the Palestinians to give up their rights and their land eventually forced him to conclude that negotiations would achieve nothing and that if the Zionist project was to succeed, 'we must increase our strength and our numbers until we reach parity with the Arabs. The life or death of the Zionist movement will depend on this... Perhaps a bitter truth but it is the truth with a capital T.' Writing in 1936 he expected this point to be reached in 5-10 years.* Ruppin died in 1943 so was not around when not just parity but numerical superiority was achieved by expelling the bulk of the indigenous Palestinian population in 1948. In the language of the occupier, there were 12 'Jewish' and 23 'Arab' 'settlements' in the Huleh valley by 1948. 'Following the establishment of the State of Israel and during the 1948 War of Independence the Arab inhabitants left the valley, moving to neighboring Arab countries'.**" (*Arthur Ruppin: Memoirs... p 320; **Lake Hula-Lake Agmon, Zohary & Hambright, jewishvirtuallibrary.org)

To be continued...

How Palestinian Beersheba Became Israeli Be'er Sheva

The ethnic cleansing of 85% of the Palestinian Arab population living in the area overrun by Zionist forces in 1948 included that of the town of Beersheba in Palestine's southern Negev Desert area.

Some idea of what the inhabitants of Beersheba were forced to endure at the time may be found in an illuminating book on the Palestinian Nakba by Israeli photography and visual culture theorist Ariella Azoulay: From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction & State Formation, 1947-1950 (2011). In her book, Azoulay combines Israeli archival photographs of the time with her own insightful, contextualising 'readings' of them.

Here are some of Azoulay's 'readings' which relate to the fate of Beersheba and its people. (The numbering relates to the order in which the photograph and its 'reading' appear in the text.):

1) "These are the mosque's final hours serving the town's Palestinian population. The new inhabitants will change its function many times, ignoring the original purpose for which it was built. When the photograph was taken, it was being used as a detention camp. Most of the people seen outside the walls of the temporary detention camps established in public buildings are Israeli soldiers. The army left 100 healthy, strong Arab men in the city to help them clean up and remove rubble. Until a few days ago they had lived in the buildings whose ruins they're now required to clear away. During the few hours they're not engaged in that activity, they're shut up in the mosque with mattresses, blankets and other belongings they've managed to save from their homes. The official caption describes them as 'Arab prisoners of war'. They'll soon be transferred to a different prisoner of war camp in Israel.

2) "About 3,000 Palestinians lived in the town at the end of the British Mandate. The day after Beersheba was captured, the only people on the street were armed soldiers on patrol whose job was to prevent life in town from returning to normal and lay the groundwork for transforming Beersheba into a Jewish town. The orders were to settle 3,000 Jews. The residents expelled from the town won't be able to enjoy the beautiful trees which will grow from the saplings recently planted along the sidewalk, and the mosque will no longer be a place of prayer."

3) "According to the [UN] Partition Plan [of 1947], seemingly accepted by the Jews, Beersheba was to have been part of the Palestinian state. But this was neither the first nor the last time Israel had violated the conditions set by the ceasefires that had been reached and the UN resolution (acting in the spirit of 'UN - Shmoo-N,' even before that policy had a name), creating facts on the ground that were inconsistent with these agreements. The conquest of Beersheba was an example. Men who had been captured, and who the soldiers suspected had not surrendered all their weapons, were shot. Others were transferred to prison camps. It's not possible to tell from the photograph what will happen to the captured Egyptian soldiers leaving the building [with hands in the air]."

5) "The [Hebrew] slogan on the bus, 'On to Gaza,' doesn't refer to the destination of the 'Egyptian prisoners of war.' They'll be exchanged a few months later, in February 1949, as part of the armistice agreement with Egypt, and now they're on their way to a prisoner of war camp. The slogan might be the warcry of fighters on their way to capture Gaza - even though, at the end of the day, they didn't capture Gaza then - or the sign on the buses that carried the residents of Beersheba who had been expelled to Gaza. Dozens of buses were put at the disposal of the residents after the town was captured, and the orders were clear: 'If we see anyone here after 8 o'clock tomorrow, we'll kill them'."

74) "The actual capture of the town during what is officially described as a 'war' was only the first in a series of non-military occupations that validated the army's behavior and played their part in expropriating the town from its residents. These began with the caption's official wording that, in one version or another, was on everyone's lips - 'The town is empty of inhabitants' - until, a few days later, this building became the JNF House. The owners of the shops on the ground floor, like the owners of the apartments above, must have been among the 450,000 refugees who in the 1960s filled out property-claim forms for the UN Reconciliation Commission that prepared an estimate (published on April 28, 1968) of the value of 'abandoned' Arab property. There's no need to mention that Israel rejected the document and ignored its implications."

88) "Military occupation was not enough to turn Beersheba, which was to have been included in the Arab state, into a Jewish town. Civil occupation was also necessary. Beginning in October 1948, after extensive areas had been captured in military operations in the south and in the north, feverish discussions were held regarding the appropriate procedure for taking over Arab land. These discussions occurred in various committees established for that purpose - the Transfer Committee headed by Yosef Weitz, the Ministerial Committee for Abandoned Property, the Committee for Distributing Lands, the JNF - as well in conversations and discussions between the Prime Minister and his associates. The solution eventually found, after many revisions, was for the state to 'legally' sell the 'abandoned' lands to the JNF as part of a 'development plan' so that the rights of the ongoing owners would allegedly be preserved. In May 1949, when Israel was accepted as a member of the United Nations, the hairsplitting ceased, and all the territory which was 'held' became part of the sovereign state of Israel. It was now important to quickly get the buildings ready for new Jewish immigrants. During the early years, the state used DDT to fumigate both the bodies of Jewish immigrants from North Africa so they wouldn't transmit disease, and the walls of the Arab houses before the Jewish immigrants moved in. If the boy has already learned Hebrew and knows how to ask what the man holding the large, noisy apparatus is doing, the proud reply would certainly be that he's preparing a lovely, disease-free home for him."

Foretelling the Nakba

Today is Nakba Day, which marks the 65th anniversary of the expulsion of around 85% of Palestine's indigenous Arab population from those parts of the territory overrun by Zionist forces in 1948.

Those expelled, augmented by further mass expulsions in 1967, make up the Palestinian refugee problem which is still with us today. Needless to say, this is because Israel refuses to repatriate these refugees simply in order to maintain a Jewish supremacist state in historic Palestine.

I've often wondered if anyone in Palestine in the years/months immediately prior to the Zionist campaign of ethnic cleansing which began in December 1947 could see, or at least sense, what was coming.

Two unblinkered observers of Palestine's Jewish community at the time, both British, certainly came close.

The following disturbing portrait of the community comes from the novelist, playwright and travel writer Robin Maugham (1916-1981), a nephew of Somerset Maugham, and appears in his 1947 book Approach to Palestine:

"It seemed to me, as I travelled round Palestine that too much time had been spent arguing the rights and wrongs of the business and far too little time in examining dispassionately the facts. Noble perorations to the converted cannot transfer populations or transmute Jews into Arabs. There are probably over 700,000 Jews in Palestine today. They are there - in the wide streets they have built and in the lovely orange groves they have planted on land that was desert. They vary in type from the old, religious gentle Zionist (who settled there before the Balfour Declaration) to the 16 year old, atheist, Russian-trained gangster who joins in a raid within 3 days of his secret landing. There are infinite variations in type and in attitude. All generalisation is bound to be inaccurate. But I found that the Jews I met could be divided into precisely the same categories as the Germans I knew in Berlin before the war.

"I found merchants and doctors who only wanted to get on with their jobs and to be left in peace. These were the moderates. Some approved of illegal immigration. All condemned terrorism. But moderates all over the world are generally the quiet, docile people. The tragedy of moderates is that they are ineffective. I asked these Jews, the friendly shopkeeper and the talkative barman, the old German specialist and the Australian tailor, I asked them why they did nothing to stop terrorism and illegal immigration. 'But what can we do to stop it?' they replied. 'How can we control the Jewish Agency? We're only little people of no importance. There's nothing we can do.' It was the same answer I used to hear in Germany, in Italy, and in Austria.

"Many of the Jews in Palestine went there to escape an evil. They decided to build a new country. For the sake of their friends still in Europe and for the sake of their children they suffered great hardship. Slowly, painfully, the desert was made fertile, the avenues were constructed. And now the evil they sought to escape has come upon them.

"Striding along the roads between the rich groves and over the blue hills of the Holy Land come bands of brown-skinned vigorous boys, flushed and bright-eyed, chanting their patriotic songs. The satchels clamped on the back of lean, healthy bodies clad only in shorts, the defiant gaze, even (surprisingly enough) the curly blonde hair - all is the same as in Hitler's Germany. Buses full of school children bellowing their slogans rush through the streets of Tel Aviv. And the parents cannot control them.

"'I would not even know if my son belonged to the Irgun Zwei a shopkeeper said with tears in his eyes. 'He would not tell me. He tells me nothing.' The old man was leaning across the counter talking to me. As he spoke, three boys of about fourteen walked into the shop, barged violently against me and ran out. I met Jews who were friendly, Jews who were nervous, men and women who openly supported the terrorists, people who said (with a backward glance to make sure that they were not overheard) that they loathed the Jewish Agency and longed to leave Palestine. The adults varied. But every single Jewish child I saw looked at me with unconcealed hatred. And every single one could speak no language except Hebrew. Fascism has come to Palestine. And the Jewish young man is potentially more dangerous than the storm trooper. He is more intelligent." (pp 85-87)

Another equally disturbing snapshot of the community comes from an article in the May 1948 edition of The Nineteenth Century Magazine, Palestine Note-Book. It was written by Bevil John Rudd (1927-2009), an officer in the Coldstream Guards:

"When I took part in the search for arms in the Jordan Valley settlements, I was very impressed with the grim determination and unity that the settlers displayed in the face of guns and bayonets. The communal pattern of their lives became clearer. It was pathetic to see photographs of their children among the parents' precious belongings, up to the age of about five, and then none at all until they were nearly grown up. From six years old they seemed to have been sent away to the child-rearing settlements. There is no such thing as family life. On the roads I have often seen bands of young children slogging along on a settlement route march. I have never seen, in the open, a mother and father with their child, not even with their baby in a pram. The babies live in a communal nursery. Parents were miserable as they told how they were only allowed to see their babies when they have come in after twelve hot hours work in the fields.

"The crudest living arrangement of all seemed to be in the tents, which housed a training company of Hagana. There were six grizly men and one girl sleeping in each tent. None of these ferocious youths had any belongings except blankets. They were a hard, pitiless band.

"In an Upper Galilee settlement, there is a Stock farm for human beings. Fine figures of Jewish youths are imported and breeding is accelerated. This blatant method of race production revolted us.

"After all these observations my mind turned against this regime of gaunt, narrow-minded people, pent up with bitterness and cunning. People who suppress a child's wish to own a rattle or a bicycle. However primitive the Arab may be, I thought his individualism worth more than the Jewish modernity and lack of liberty. On the other hand, if the Jewish community plans a struggle - the survival of the fittest - in the Middle East, then mass-produced, tough, settlement stock is the breed they want. Otherwise I do not understand what all this is leading to. Surely some form of master race, so similar, it seems, to the Nazis."

Now lest any Zionist thought police out there mount their high horses to condemn Maugham and Rudd's Zionist-Nazi analogising as mere expressions of rank anti-Semitism, let them first ponder deeply the following diary entry for 17/3/45 by Lord Balfour's niece, Blanche Dugdale:

"Went to the Dorchester and had tea with Chaim [Weizmann] and Vera... [Chaim] painted a dark picture of psychology of rising generation in the Yishuv, said Ben-Gurion is much to blame and is perhaps frightened now of the devils he has failed to discourage." (Baffy: The Diaries of Blanche Dugdale 1936-1947, 1973, p 219)

And this for 25/3/45:

"After tea I walked with [Chaim] in Hyde Park, he poured out things that made him uneasy about the youth in the Yishuv. He said Ben-Gurion was largely responsible and had much on his conscience." (ibid, p 220)