... the Dalai Lama:
Q: His Holiness, around the time Tibetans lost their rights when they were occupied by China, another nation faced a similar tragedy, the Palestinians. The Israeli occupation of Palestine continues with full support from the United States and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Millions of indigenous Palestinians have been made refugees and are denied the right to return to their homeland. We sometimes read your statements sympathetic to Israel but not the suffering of the Palestinians. Could you please enlighten us with your view on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine under illegal Israeli occupation?
A: The Jewish viewpoint of Israel is one of ancient times where they were made refugees thousands of years ago. I met groups of Palestinians who wanted their rights. It is difficult to judge but they should live together and help each other. In Jerusalem the land is greener and they use every technique. The side of Palestine is dry and not green. They should use the skills of the Jews and live together. On my second visit to Tel Aviv, I met a small group of Palestinians and Israelis living together in harmony. Israeli President Shimon Peres I know him, he is genuine for peace. With more interactions both for peace, sooner or later a clash will sort the problem. Palestine is an older issue than the Tibetan issue but violence is still involved. It is very sad."
(From Challenging the Dalai Lama on his views on the Israeli occupation, Shareefa Panchbhaya, peaceandcommunity.wordpress.com, 19/6/12)
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
The Hun Du Jour
Remember the Huns who bayoneted Belgian babies? The Iraqi soldiers who ripped Kuwaiti preemies from their humidicribs and dashed their brains out? Saddam's people-shredder? (Loved that one!) Wonderful, unforgettable moments in war propaganda, weren't they?
Well, in the spirit of plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose, Murdoch's Australian is pleased to present the Hun du jour:
"As they rampage through villages, Mr Assad's forces slit the throats of children." (Editorial, New options needed for Syria)
Well, in the spirit of plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose, Murdoch's Australian is pleased to present the Hun du jour:
"As they rampage through villages, Mr Assad's forces slit the throats of children." (Editorial, New options needed for Syria)
Monday, August 6, 2012
Zionising the Draft Modern History Curriculum 3
Here is the Australian Curriculum, Assessment & Reporting Authority's third dot point:
*The nature and consequences of Palestinian reactions to Israel, including the Intifada (1987-94) and the 2nd Intifada (2000-2006).
And here's the response of ECAJ's Peter Wertheim:
"The third dot point refers to 'the nature and consequences of Palestinian reactions to Israel, including the Intifada 1987-94 and the 2nd Intifada 2000-2006'. This implies, incorrectly, that the predominant Palestinian reactions to Israel have been the two intifada's [sic]. We would suggest that the dot point be amended to read: 'the nature and consequences of Palestinian reactions to Israel from 1947, including rejectionism, pan-Arabism and armed conflict, the PLO and its Charter, terrorism, the phases strategy, Intifada 1 (1987-93), the PLO-Hamas split, boycotts and political campaigns against Israel's legitimacy.'"
My critique of Wertheim is as follows:
1) 1947? The implication being that the Palestinian leadership and people, who, at the time, constituted the majority of Palestine's population, should have thrown their kuffiyehs into the air, danced in the streets and otherwise joyfully welcomed the decision of the White Man's club, as the UN then was, to partition their homeland, without in any way consulting them or even referring the matter the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and hand over 56% of it to a recently arrived colon community which had purchased only around 6% of the land. And that's construed by Wertheim and friends as 'rejectionism'.
2) Pan-Arabism? How typically narcissistic! As if pan-Arabist ideas were a mere consequence of Zionist colonization.
3) Armed conflict? The historically correct term here should be 'armed struggle'. Armed conflict is what the British-backed Zionist project in Palestine was bound to lead to, indigenes, including our own, never having been known for taking kindly to being steamrolled by blow-ins. (Funny that!) Furthermore, armed conflict is what Israel routinely engages in to achieve the Zionist movement's historic goal of Eretz Israel, lock, stock and barrel (plus any additional bits of land it can get away with such as Syria's Golan Heights). Armed struggle, on the other hand, is a means sanctioned by international law by which colonized peoples may regain their trampled rights. For example, UNGA Resolution 33/44 of 23 November 1979 reads in part: "[The General Assembly] Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and alien domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle" (para 2), and "Strongly condemns all Governments which do not recognize the right of self-determination and independence of all peoples still under colonial and foreign domination and alien subjugation, notably the peoples of Africa and the Palestinian people." (para 12)
4) Terrorism? The movement which gave us the Irgun, the Stern Gang, Plan Dalet, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, countless massacres, aggressions, invasions, occupations, and the quaintly-named Israel Defence Force dares to throw around the 't' word?
5) The phases strategy? You mean those dweadful people (who don't exist according to Golda Meir and Newt Gingrich) have plotted to regain their homeland bit by bit? OMG, such wickedness! They must've taken a leaf out of Ben-Gurion's book when he said in 1938: "[I am] satisfied with part of the country, but on the basis of the assumption that after we build up a strong force following the establishment of the state we will abolish the partition of the country and expand to the whole Land of Israel." (One Palestine Complete, Tom Segev, p 403)
6) PLO-Hamas split? Hello? Hamas was never a part of the PLO.
7) BDS? Absolutely - the more our students learn about BDS the better. Bring it on. Well done, Peter.
To be continued...
*The nature and consequences of Palestinian reactions to Israel, including the Intifada (1987-94) and the 2nd Intifada (2000-2006).
And here's the response of ECAJ's Peter Wertheim:
"The third dot point refers to 'the nature and consequences of Palestinian reactions to Israel, including the Intifada 1987-94 and the 2nd Intifada 2000-2006'. This implies, incorrectly, that the predominant Palestinian reactions to Israel have been the two intifada's [sic]. We would suggest that the dot point be amended to read: 'the nature and consequences of Palestinian reactions to Israel from 1947, including rejectionism, pan-Arabism and armed conflict, the PLO and its Charter, terrorism, the phases strategy, Intifada 1 (1987-93), the PLO-Hamas split, boycotts and political campaigns against Israel's legitimacy.'"
My critique of Wertheim is as follows:
1) 1947? The implication being that the Palestinian leadership and people, who, at the time, constituted the majority of Palestine's population, should have thrown their kuffiyehs into the air, danced in the streets and otherwise joyfully welcomed the decision of the White Man's club, as the UN then was, to partition their homeland, without in any way consulting them or even referring the matter the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and hand over 56% of it to a recently arrived colon community which had purchased only around 6% of the land. And that's construed by Wertheim and friends as 'rejectionism'.
2) Pan-Arabism? How typically narcissistic! As if pan-Arabist ideas were a mere consequence of Zionist colonization.
3) Armed conflict? The historically correct term here should be 'armed struggle'. Armed conflict is what the British-backed Zionist project in Palestine was bound to lead to, indigenes, including our own, never having been known for taking kindly to being steamrolled by blow-ins. (Funny that!) Furthermore, armed conflict is what Israel routinely engages in to achieve the Zionist movement's historic goal of Eretz Israel, lock, stock and barrel (plus any additional bits of land it can get away with such as Syria's Golan Heights). Armed struggle, on the other hand, is a means sanctioned by international law by which colonized peoples may regain their trampled rights. For example, UNGA Resolution 33/44 of 23 November 1979 reads in part: "[The General Assembly] Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and alien domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle" (para 2), and "Strongly condemns all Governments which do not recognize the right of self-determination and independence of all peoples still under colonial and foreign domination and alien subjugation, notably the peoples of Africa and the Palestinian people." (para 12)
4) Terrorism? The movement which gave us the Irgun, the Stern Gang, Plan Dalet, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, countless massacres, aggressions, invasions, occupations, and the quaintly-named Israel Defence Force dares to throw around the 't' word?
5) The phases strategy? You mean those dweadful people (who don't exist according to Golda Meir and Newt Gingrich) have plotted to regain their homeland bit by bit? OMG, such wickedness! They must've taken a leaf out of Ben-Gurion's book when he said in 1938: "[I am] satisfied with part of the country, but on the basis of the assumption that after we build up a strong force following the establishment of the state we will abolish the partition of the country and expand to the whole Land of Israel." (One Palestine Complete, Tom Segev, p 403)
6) PLO-Hamas split? Hello? Hamas was never a part of the PLO.
7) BDS? Absolutely - the more our students learn about BDS the better. Bring it on. Well done, Peter.
To be continued...
Sunday, August 5, 2012
Zionising the Draft Modern History Curriculum 2
Here is the Australian Curriculum, Assessment & Reporting Authority's second dot point:
*The continuing story of conflict between Arabs and Israelis, with particular reference to the Suez War (1956), the Six-Day War (1967), the Munich Olympics (1972), the Yom Kippur War (1973), Israeli invasions of Lebanon (1978, 1982, 2006), and Israel's decision to disengage with Gaza in 2005.
My back-of-an-envelope critique of the above is as follows:
Inexplicably, one of the two key actors in this vicious colonial drama, the Palestinian refugees (comprising around 85% of the entire Palestinian population of the 78% of Palestine overrun by Zionist forces in 1948), stateless and struggling to survive in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza, fail to make an appearance here. Ditto for the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the Palestinian resistance movement led by Arafat, Habash, etc. The focus is entirely on state actors. Why? Can't ACARA handle the concept that resistance follows ethnic cleansing and apartheid as surely as night follows day? Note too the adoption of blatantly Zionist terminolgy - Six-Day War and Yom Kippur War. Is this ignorance or design? Is it really too much to ask for more neutral terminology such as the 'June 1967 War' or the 'October War' (a mean between 'Yom Kippur' and 'Ramadan' War)? Surely, if it's good enough for the vicious, unprovoked British, French, Israeli aggression against Egypt in 1956 to be construed as a 'war', then I'm hardly asking for too much. Alternatively, why not simply call them the Second, Third and Fourth Arab-Israeli Wars? And as for Munich 1972, why should a hostage drama gone wrong, involving the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes, take precedence over the plethora of far more deadly Israeli massacres of Palestinian and other Arab civilians throughout the 50s, 60s and 70s, to go no further?
Now here's Peter Wertheim's responses to ACARA's second dot point, followed by my own comments:
"A fundamental difficulty with the second dot point is that it fails to distinguish between (i) conflicts between Israel and the Arab States and (ii) conflicts between Israel and terrorist organizations, and omits entirely (iii) conflicts between the Palestinians and the Arab States ('Black September' in Jordan 1970, Lebanon 1975-1982, Syria 1982) and (iv) internal Palestinian conflicts (Gaza 2007). These shortcomings should be corrected."
The fundamental difficulty here, of course, is Wertheim's deployment of the loaded term "terrorist organisations" when describing armed Palestinian resistance to Zionist colonization. Note too, the too-clever-by-half inclusion of "conflicts between the Palestinians and the Arab States," and "internal Palestinian conflicts," designed to paint the Palestinians as merely incorrigible troublemakers and misfits, incapable of living peacefully either with other Arabs or even themselves. That the Palestinian resistance movement had to operate from neighbouring Arab countries, each with their own interests and agendas (or, more to the point, stand up to USraeli glove-puppets such as the Jordanian monarchy or Lebanon's Phalangists) is apparently neither here nor there for Wertheim. Likewise, the portrayal of the Hamas government's pre-emptive coup against the USraeli-backed Fateh in 2007 as a purely "internal conflict" is risible. Oh, and that bit about 'Palestinian-Syrian war of 1982', I couldn't for the life of me find any record of it. Plenty of action in 1982, mind you, all to do with Israel laying waste to West Beirut, but, sadly, nothing on Palestinians mixing it with Syrians.
"The second dot point also refers to 'Israeli invasions of Lebanon (1978, 1982, 2006)'. For context and completeness this should be amended to read: 'terrorist incursions into Israel from Lebanon after 1970; the Israeli military intervention in Lebanon in 1978 (Operation Litani) and the invasion of 1982; Operation Accountability (1993) and Operation Grapes of Wrath (1996); the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon (1985-2000) and the final withdrawal in May 2000; the Israel-Hezbollah war of 2006'."
Oh I see, Palestinian refugees should've just sat around on their hands in Lebanon, content in the knowledge that the Israelis who evicted them were doing an infinitely better job of running Palestine - sorry, Israel - than they, and realized just how damn lucky they were to have new, wonderful, Lebanese neighbours. But no, these chronic malcontents just couldn't help themselves, could they? Instead of celebrating the good turn Israel had done them and disappearing quietly into the Lebanese woodwork, they just had to periodically gatecrash the party south of the border and make thorough nuisances of themselves, leaving the long-suffering Israelis with no choice - none! - but to periodically invade - sorry, stage operations in - Lebanon. And if any Lebanese happened to get in the way, well, they should've taken comfort in the fact that those invasions - sorry, operations - were undertaken for a very good reason, so no hard feelings, Messrs Begin, Sharon and Olmert, keep up the good work and God bless.
"Also in the second dot point, the words 'disengage with Gaza' should be amended to read 'withdrawal from Gaza'. Israel is still 'engaged' with Gaza in that it supplies most of the electricity used in Gaza and the humanitarian supply of goods to Gaza by the UN is via Israeli territory with the co-operation of the Israeli government."
I'm sorry, I simply cannot dignify the above with a response - except to say: don't ever let anyone tell you that the Israel lobby in general and ECAJ's Peter Wertheim in particular doesn't have a sense of humour.
To be continued...
*The continuing story of conflict between Arabs and Israelis, with particular reference to the Suez War (1956), the Six-Day War (1967), the Munich Olympics (1972), the Yom Kippur War (1973), Israeli invasions of Lebanon (1978, 1982, 2006), and Israel's decision to disengage with Gaza in 2005.
My back-of-an-envelope critique of the above is as follows:
Inexplicably, one of the two key actors in this vicious colonial drama, the Palestinian refugees (comprising around 85% of the entire Palestinian population of the 78% of Palestine overrun by Zionist forces in 1948), stateless and struggling to survive in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza, fail to make an appearance here. Ditto for the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the Palestinian resistance movement led by Arafat, Habash, etc. The focus is entirely on state actors. Why? Can't ACARA handle the concept that resistance follows ethnic cleansing and apartheid as surely as night follows day? Note too the adoption of blatantly Zionist terminolgy - Six-Day War and Yom Kippur War. Is this ignorance or design? Is it really too much to ask for more neutral terminology such as the 'June 1967 War' or the 'October War' (a mean between 'Yom Kippur' and 'Ramadan' War)? Surely, if it's good enough for the vicious, unprovoked British, French, Israeli aggression against Egypt in 1956 to be construed as a 'war', then I'm hardly asking for too much. Alternatively, why not simply call them the Second, Third and Fourth Arab-Israeli Wars? And as for Munich 1972, why should a hostage drama gone wrong, involving the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes, take precedence over the plethora of far more deadly Israeli massacres of Palestinian and other Arab civilians throughout the 50s, 60s and 70s, to go no further?
Now here's Peter Wertheim's responses to ACARA's second dot point, followed by my own comments:
"A fundamental difficulty with the second dot point is that it fails to distinguish between (i) conflicts between Israel and the Arab States and (ii) conflicts between Israel and terrorist organizations, and omits entirely (iii) conflicts between the Palestinians and the Arab States ('Black September' in Jordan 1970, Lebanon 1975-1982, Syria 1982) and (iv) internal Palestinian conflicts (Gaza 2007). These shortcomings should be corrected."
The fundamental difficulty here, of course, is Wertheim's deployment of the loaded term "terrorist organisations" when describing armed Palestinian resistance to Zionist colonization. Note too, the too-clever-by-half inclusion of "conflicts between the Palestinians and the Arab States," and "internal Palestinian conflicts," designed to paint the Palestinians as merely incorrigible troublemakers and misfits, incapable of living peacefully either with other Arabs or even themselves. That the Palestinian resistance movement had to operate from neighbouring Arab countries, each with their own interests and agendas (or, more to the point, stand up to USraeli glove-puppets such as the Jordanian monarchy or Lebanon's Phalangists) is apparently neither here nor there for Wertheim. Likewise, the portrayal of the Hamas government's pre-emptive coup against the USraeli-backed Fateh in 2007 as a purely "internal conflict" is risible. Oh, and that bit about 'Palestinian-Syrian war of 1982', I couldn't for the life of me find any record of it. Plenty of action in 1982, mind you, all to do with Israel laying waste to West Beirut, but, sadly, nothing on Palestinians mixing it with Syrians.
"The second dot point also refers to 'Israeli invasions of Lebanon (1978, 1982, 2006)'. For context and completeness this should be amended to read: 'terrorist incursions into Israel from Lebanon after 1970; the Israeli military intervention in Lebanon in 1978 (Operation Litani) and the invasion of 1982; Operation Accountability (1993) and Operation Grapes of Wrath (1996); the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon (1985-2000) and the final withdrawal in May 2000; the Israel-Hezbollah war of 2006'."
Oh I see, Palestinian refugees should've just sat around on their hands in Lebanon, content in the knowledge that the Israelis who evicted them were doing an infinitely better job of running Palestine - sorry, Israel - than they, and realized just how damn lucky they were to have new, wonderful, Lebanese neighbours. But no, these chronic malcontents just couldn't help themselves, could they? Instead of celebrating the good turn Israel had done them and disappearing quietly into the Lebanese woodwork, they just had to periodically gatecrash the party south of the border and make thorough nuisances of themselves, leaving the long-suffering Israelis with no choice - none! - but to periodically invade - sorry, stage operations in - Lebanon. And if any Lebanese happened to get in the way, well, they should've taken comfort in the fact that those invasions - sorry, operations - were undertaken for a very good reason, so no hard feelings, Messrs Begin, Sharon and Olmert, keep up the good work and God bless.
"Also in the second dot point, the words 'disengage with Gaza' should be amended to read 'withdrawal from Gaza'. Israel is still 'engaged' with Gaza in that it supplies most of the electricity used in Gaza and the humanitarian supply of goods to Gaza by the UN is via Israeli territory with the co-operation of the Israeli government."
I'm sorry, I simply cannot dignify the above with a response - except to say: don't ever let anyone tell you that the Israel lobby in general and ECAJ's Peter Wertheim in particular doesn't have a sense of humour.
To be continued...
Saturday, August 4, 2012
Gore Vidal , America's George Orwell
Courageous American intellectual, essayist, novelist, playwright and critic of American imperialism, Gore Vidal, died last week.
You wouldn't know though, from the obituaries in the Australian press (Man of letters last of his kind, AP/The Australian, 2/8/12; Insider author understood the world, Guardian News/Sydney Morning Herald, 3/8/12) that one of America's greatest minds had no trouble whatever understanding and deploring the bizarre and malign hold exercised by the Israel lobby over the United States' Middle East policy.
The only indication in the Australia press that Vidal had somehow escaped the 'Elephant? What elephant?' conditioning and cowardice that characterises most American (and Australian) intellectuals* came from a New York Times piece by Charles McGrath: "Some of his political positions were quarrelsome and provocative. Vidal was an outspoken critic of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians..."
There you have it, for The New York Times, anyone who criticises Israel, if not simply ignored or dismissed outright as an anti-Semite, may be accused of being "quarrelsome and provocative"!
That the US (and The New York Times) had a bit of an 'elephant' problem, was nothing new for Vidal. He was aware of it back in the 60s:
"As I left, I told [Mohammed Hassanein Heikal, editor of Egypt's Al-Ahram newspaper and friend of its president, Gamal Abdul Nasser] that if I saw Nasser at the end of the week I was perfectly willing to present to the American public Egypt's case against Israel, just as Egypt would like it presented. Partly out of a sense of mischief (we hear altogether too much of the other side) and partly out of a sense of justice, I thought that the Arab case should be given attention in the American press. As of now it has been disregarded. In fact, a few years ago the Egyptians, despairing of ever seeing their cause presented impartially in the usual 'news' columns, tried to buy an advertisement in The New York Times. They were turned down. As a result, the Egyptians are somewhat cynical about our 'free press.' They are also quite aware that when Israel was founded in 1948 and the Arabs protested to Harry Truman, he told them with characteristic bluntness: 'I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.'** Heikal laughed when I told him that the Arab point of view might one day be given in the American national press. 'Your press would never let you,' he said with finality, as one journalist to another. 'Don't even try.'" (Passage to Egypt (1963), in The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal, Edited by Jay Parini, 2008, p 283)
And here's Vidal discussing the 'elephant' 30 years later, in his Foreword to the first printing (1994) of Israel Shahak's Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years:
"Sometime in the late 1950s, that world-class gossip and occasional historian, John F. Kennedy, told me how, in 1948, Harry S. Truman had been pretty much abandoned by everyone when he came to run for president. Then an American Zionist brought him 2 million dollars in cash, in a suitcase, aboard his whistle-stop campaign train. 'That's why our recognition of Israel was rushed through so fast.' As neither Jack nor I was an antisemite (unlike his father and my grandfather) we took this to be just another funny story about Truman and the serene corruption of American politics.
"Unfortunately, the hurried recognition of Israel as a state has resulted in 45 years of murderous confusion, and the destruction of what Zionist fellow travellers thought would be a pluralistic state - home to its native population of Muslims, Christians and Jews, as well as a future home to peaceful European and American Jewish immigrants, even the ones who affected to believe that the great realtor in the sky had given them, in perpetuity, the lands of Judea and Samaria. Since many of the immigrants were good socialists in Europe, we assumed that they would not allow the new state to become a theocracy, and that the native Palestinians could live with them as equals. This was not meant to be. I shall not rehearse the wars and alarms of that unhappy region. But I will say that the hasty invention of Israel has poisoned the political and intellectual life of the USA, Israel's unlikely patron.
"Unlikely, because no other minority in American history has ever hijacked so much money from the American taxpayers in order to invest in a 'homeland'. It is as if the American taxpayer had been obliged to support the Pope in his reconquest of the Papal States simply because one third of our people are Roman Catholic. Had this been attempted, there would have been a great uproar and Congress would have said no. But a religious minority of less than 2% has bought or intimidated 70 senators (the necessary two thirds to overcome an unlikely presidential veto) while enjoying the support of the media."
These days the best indication of an individual's true worth as a man and an intellectual is to seek out the opinion of a leading Zionist shill on him and assume the opposite. As it happens, Israel's loudest voice in the Australian ms media, Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan, has called Vidal "no George Orwell" (Celebrity novelist insulted enemies with mocking style, The Australian, 2/8/12), so there you have it, folks; Vidal is America's George Orwell.
[*Characterised most recently by US geographer Jared Diamond's complete failure to mention the Palestinians and Israel's occupation when correcting Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney's misrepresentation of his Guns, Germs & Steel thesis, which Romney had cited to claim that Israel's 'success' vis-a-vis the Palestinians boiled down to cultural superiority. (See Romney hasn't done his homework, New York Times, 1/8/12); ** To correct Vidal, Truman was actually speaking to a group of America's diplomats in the Middle East (See my 21/4/10 post No George Marshall.).
You wouldn't know though, from the obituaries in the Australian press (Man of letters last of his kind, AP/The Australian, 2/8/12; Insider author understood the world, Guardian News/Sydney Morning Herald, 3/8/12) that one of America's greatest minds had no trouble whatever understanding and deploring the bizarre and malign hold exercised by the Israel lobby over the United States' Middle East policy.
The only indication in the Australia press that Vidal had somehow escaped the 'Elephant? What elephant?' conditioning and cowardice that characterises most American (and Australian) intellectuals* came from a New York Times piece by Charles McGrath: "Some of his political positions were quarrelsome and provocative. Vidal was an outspoken critic of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians..."
There you have it, for The New York Times, anyone who criticises Israel, if not simply ignored or dismissed outright as an anti-Semite, may be accused of being "quarrelsome and provocative"!
That the US (and The New York Times) had a bit of an 'elephant' problem, was nothing new for Vidal. He was aware of it back in the 60s:
"As I left, I told [Mohammed Hassanein Heikal, editor of Egypt's Al-Ahram newspaper and friend of its president, Gamal Abdul Nasser] that if I saw Nasser at the end of the week I was perfectly willing to present to the American public Egypt's case against Israel, just as Egypt would like it presented. Partly out of a sense of mischief (we hear altogether too much of the other side) and partly out of a sense of justice, I thought that the Arab case should be given attention in the American press. As of now it has been disregarded. In fact, a few years ago the Egyptians, despairing of ever seeing their cause presented impartially in the usual 'news' columns, tried to buy an advertisement in The New York Times. They were turned down. As a result, the Egyptians are somewhat cynical about our 'free press.' They are also quite aware that when Israel was founded in 1948 and the Arabs protested to Harry Truman, he told them with characteristic bluntness: 'I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.'** Heikal laughed when I told him that the Arab point of view might one day be given in the American national press. 'Your press would never let you,' he said with finality, as one journalist to another. 'Don't even try.'" (Passage to Egypt (1963), in The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal, Edited by Jay Parini, 2008, p 283)
And here's Vidal discussing the 'elephant' 30 years later, in his Foreword to the first printing (1994) of Israel Shahak's Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years:
"Sometime in the late 1950s, that world-class gossip and occasional historian, John F. Kennedy, told me how, in 1948, Harry S. Truman had been pretty much abandoned by everyone when he came to run for president. Then an American Zionist brought him 2 million dollars in cash, in a suitcase, aboard his whistle-stop campaign train. 'That's why our recognition of Israel was rushed through so fast.' As neither Jack nor I was an antisemite (unlike his father and my grandfather) we took this to be just another funny story about Truman and the serene corruption of American politics.
"Unfortunately, the hurried recognition of Israel as a state has resulted in 45 years of murderous confusion, and the destruction of what Zionist fellow travellers thought would be a pluralistic state - home to its native population of Muslims, Christians and Jews, as well as a future home to peaceful European and American Jewish immigrants, even the ones who affected to believe that the great realtor in the sky had given them, in perpetuity, the lands of Judea and Samaria. Since many of the immigrants were good socialists in Europe, we assumed that they would not allow the new state to become a theocracy, and that the native Palestinians could live with them as equals. This was not meant to be. I shall not rehearse the wars and alarms of that unhappy region. But I will say that the hasty invention of Israel has poisoned the political and intellectual life of the USA, Israel's unlikely patron.
"Unlikely, because no other minority in American history has ever hijacked so much money from the American taxpayers in order to invest in a 'homeland'. It is as if the American taxpayer had been obliged to support the Pope in his reconquest of the Papal States simply because one third of our people are Roman Catholic. Had this been attempted, there would have been a great uproar and Congress would have said no. But a religious minority of less than 2% has bought or intimidated 70 senators (the necessary two thirds to overcome an unlikely presidential veto) while enjoying the support of the media."
These days the best indication of an individual's true worth as a man and an intellectual is to seek out the opinion of a leading Zionist shill on him and assume the opposite. As it happens, Israel's loudest voice in the Australian ms media, Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan, has called Vidal "no George Orwell" (Celebrity novelist insulted enemies with mocking style, The Australian, 2/8/12), so there you have it, folks; Vidal is America's George Orwell.
[*Characterised most recently by US geographer Jared Diamond's complete failure to mention the Palestinians and Israel's occupation when correcting Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney's misrepresentation of his Guns, Germs & Steel thesis, which Romney had cited to claim that Israel's 'success' vis-a-vis the Palestinians boiled down to cultural superiority. (See Romney hasn't done his homework, New York Times, 1/8/12); ** To correct Vidal, Truman was actually speaking to a group of America's diplomats in the Middle East (See my 21/4/10 post No George Marshall.).
Friday, August 3, 2012
Palestine's Patriot Dead
Remember our Dorset farmer (By George, He Gets It!, 1/7/12)?
"I was glad to get away, especially after my tour [of Acre prison] was ended by my being shown the execution chamber, and the gallows on which so many men have died. One piece of probably unwitting savagery jarred upon me. The condemned cells are cages in the vestibule to the execution-chamber. There are two of them, and if, as often happens, there is more than one execution to be carried out on a certain morning, the second or subsequent victim, must suffer the agonies of the damned - for he can see his comrade in evil fortune taken out, hear all that takes place on the farther side of the black door - and then die himself a hundred times before the bolts of his cage are shot back, and it is his turn to suffer.
"The British Inspector who took me round told me that there had been as many as 3 executions on one morning, one of them being the time when 3 men were hanged for their parts in the 1929 rebellion. 'It's not fair,' he said. 'In an English prison the governor and deputy-governor have a far easier time than Jock and I have here with these continued executions.
"'What do you mean?' I asked.
"'In England,' he replied, 'it is bad enough. Like us, a prison governor there gets to know the man who is going to be hanged. You see him every day. You know his motives and his own feelings - often a murderer is not nearly so bad a criminal as a professional thief or blackmailer, let alone a dope-dealer or a white-slaver. He's often some poor devil who has killed in a sudden fit of overmastering passion, jealousy or rage - I often feel like saying 'there but for the grace of Allah goes little me.'
"'As I say, you get to know the man, his relatives, and his own worries and family-troubles, and then you've got to kill him with your own hands, for we British officers have to act as executioners, not just stand by and watch like our opposite numbers do in England. It's a rotten job, believe me. I'm pretty tough, but I'd give anything to be really sick on an execution morning, so that I could beg off the spectacle.
"'Surely you don't get much chance to weep over the troubles of the fellows who are tried by the Military Courts?' I said.
"His face set grimly. 'No, and there'd be no tears in any case for that bunch of crooks. I want no excuse to miss their hangings, believe me.'
"'But why?' I asked. 'Aren't they quite sincere in believing that they are fighting for their rights?'
"The burly Inspector snorted. 'Don't make me sick,' he grunted. 'They're just a gang of toughs looting and killing for what they can make out of it. They're not patriots, they're criminals.'
"'I suppose that you served in the Royal Irish Constabulary, didn't you?' I asked. 'Most of the officers of the Palestine Police seem to have done so.'
"'I did,' he said, 'and it was a far better and safer job than this one.'
"'Some of the men who were hanged during the Troubles of 1919, '20 and '21, were also condemned as criminals,' I said gently. 'Kevin Barry and the rest.'
"'That was different, they were white men,' the Inspector snorted.
"'You mean that they are heroes nowadays, noble patriots, held as martyrs by their fellows, because they were white men - and, conversely, that the Arabs, whom you are hanging, are ruffianly murderers because their skins are brown?' I inquired.
"'Go to Hell!' he said, and turned upon his heel.
"I passed out of Hell, instead, by recrossing the narrow bridge, and, as I emerged on to the rampart walk, felt a dirty, greasy cloud lifting off my spirit." (Palestine Unveiled, Douglas V. Duff, 1938, pp 72-74)
"I was glad to get away, especially after my tour [of Acre prison] was ended by my being shown the execution chamber, and the gallows on which so many men have died. One piece of probably unwitting savagery jarred upon me. The condemned cells are cages in the vestibule to the execution-chamber. There are two of them, and if, as often happens, there is more than one execution to be carried out on a certain morning, the second or subsequent victim, must suffer the agonies of the damned - for he can see his comrade in evil fortune taken out, hear all that takes place on the farther side of the black door - and then die himself a hundred times before the bolts of his cage are shot back, and it is his turn to suffer.
"The British Inspector who took me round told me that there had been as many as 3 executions on one morning, one of them being the time when 3 men were hanged for their parts in the 1929 rebellion. 'It's not fair,' he said. 'In an English prison the governor and deputy-governor have a far easier time than Jock and I have here with these continued executions.
"'What do you mean?' I asked.
"'In England,' he replied, 'it is bad enough. Like us, a prison governor there gets to know the man who is going to be hanged. You see him every day. You know his motives and his own feelings - often a murderer is not nearly so bad a criminal as a professional thief or blackmailer, let alone a dope-dealer or a white-slaver. He's often some poor devil who has killed in a sudden fit of overmastering passion, jealousy or rage - I often feel like saying 'there but for the grace of Allah goes little me.'
"'As I say, you get to know the man, his relatives, and his own worries and family-troubles, and then you've got to kill him with your own hands, for we British officers have to act as executioners, not just stand by and watch like our opposite numbers do in England. It's a rotten job, believe me. I'm pretty tough, but I'd give anything to be really sick on an execution morning, so that I could beg off the spectacle.
"'Surely you don't get much chance to weep over the troubles of the fellows who are tried by the Military Courts?' I said.
"His face set grimly. 'No, and there'd be no tears in any case for that bunch of crooks. I want no excuse to miss their hangings, believe me.'
"'But why?' I asked. 'Aren't they quite sincere in believing that they are fighting for their rights?'
"The burly Inspector snorted. 'Don't make me sick,' he grunted. 'They're just a gang of toughs looting and killing for what they can make out of it. They're not patriots, they're criminals.'
"'I suppose that you served in the Royal Irish Constabulary, didn't you?' I asked. 'Most of the officers of the Palestine Police seem to have done so.'
"'I did,' he said, 'and it was a far better and safer job than this one.'
"'Some of the men who were hanged during the Troubles of 1919, '20 and '21, were also condemned as criminals,' I said gently. 'Kevin Barry and the rest.'
"'That was different, they were white men,' the Inspector snorted.
"'You mean that they are heroes nowadays, noble patriots, held as martyrs by their fellows, because they were white men - and, conversely, that the Arabs, whom you are hanging, are ruffianly murderers because their skins are brown?' I inquired.
"'Go to Hell!' he said, and turned upon his heel.
"I passed out of Hell, instead, by recrossing the narrow bridge, and, as I emerged on to the rampart walk, felt a dirty, greasy cloud lifting off my spirit." (Palestine Unveiled, Douglas V. Duff, 1938, pp 72-74)
Thursday, August 2, 2012
Zionising the Draft Modern History Curriculum 1
Not content with warping our Middle East policy, interfering with our right to peaceful protest, and intimidating our mass media, the Zionist lobby also seeks to fiddle with our national draft Modern History curriculum:
"The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just one area of the new national draft Modern History curriculum that the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) says needs to be changed. Earlier this month, ECAJ executive director Peter Wertheim wrote to the Australian Assessment & Reporting Authority [ACARA] to suggest a number of changes and clarifications to the draft national curricula for both Modern and Ancient History. They include correcting an implication that the establishment of the State of Israel was the main determinant of the deterioration in relations between Jews and Arabs; disputing the phrase 'dispossession of Arab lands'; and questioning why the 1994 Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty plus all post-Oslo peace attempts with the Palestinians have been ommitted." (Changes required in new history syllabus, The Australian Jewish News, 27/7/12)
To see what's at stake here, nothing less than an attempt at the Zionist brainwashing of our senior history students, I thought it'd be useful to quote in full each of the draft curriculum's dot points objected to by Wertheim (to be found in the unit 'The Struggle for Peace in the Middle East'), reproduce his responses to these, and then critique both. (Please note that, for reasons of space, my critiques will perforce appear non-consecutively over the course of this month under the title above.
Here's the draft curriculum's first dot point: *The British mandate in Palestine and the significance of the establishment of the state of Israel, including the immediate consequences for relations between Jews and Arabs, the Arab-Israeli War of 1948-49, and the nature of the dispossession of Palestinian lands.
And here's Wertheim's complaint: "The first dot point allows for no historical background, conflates several distinct but important matters and draws tendentious links between different events. For example it mixes together 'the British mandate in Palestine' and 'the establishment of the state of Israel' and implies that the latter was the main determinant of the deterioration in 'relations between Jews and Arabs'. In fact, organised Arab attacks against Jews in Palestine began in 1920 and a full-scale civil war against the Jewish population was declared by the Arab Higher Committee (Palestinian leadership) and Arab League following the endorsement of partition by the UN General Assembly in November 1947, a critical event that the draft has omitted. The expression 'dispossession of Arab [sic] lands' carries with it an assumption about rightful ownership which is heavily contested and is a core issue of the conflict..."
My critique of Wertheim is as follows:
1) Mixing together 'the British mandate in Palestine' and 'the establishment of the state of Israel'? What's the problem? The British mandate was the womb from which the state of Israel emerged. Without Britain's facilitation of mass Jewish immigration and land sales to the Jews, its role in supporting the growth of a powerful Jewish militia, its refusal to grant meaningful political representation to Palestine's majority Arab community, and its vicious repression of indigenous Palestinian Arab resistance to Zionist colonization, Israel would never have come into being.
2) Of course indigenous Palestinian Arab opposition to the Zionist project didn't begin with the creation of Israel in 1948. It developed gradually as news of British support for the creation of a 'national home for the Jewish people' (in the form of the Balfour Declaration of 1917) spread among the Palestinian Arabs, and escalated in tandem with increases in Jewish immigration and land acquisition and the incorporation of the 'national home' policy into the text of the League of Nations mandate for Palestine. The indigenous Palestinian Arab population correctly saw their homeland passing into Jewish hands under the protection of British bayonets. Decrying (or expressing surprise at) Palestinian attacks on Jewish colons in such a context is akin to decrying American Indian or Australian Aboriginal attacks on the white settlers who flooded into their lands.
3) Full-scale war against the Jewish population by the Palestinian Arabs following the partition of Palestine in November 1947? This is a monstrous misrepresentation. After 1939, Zionist forces and terror gangs first turned their guns on the British mandate government, forcing the British to hand the problem they had so foolishly created with their 'national home' policy to the UN for deliberation. Then, following that body's outrageous decision to partition Palestine without consulting its people in November 1947, the Zionists turned their guns on the majority Palestinian Arab population in an attempt to secure a Jewish Palestine with as few Arabs as possible. Between December 1947 and May 1948, before the intervention of Arab armies, Zionist forces implemented their notorious Plan Dalet, systematically driving the Palestinians out of their villages, towns and cities, and creating the Palestinian refugee problem that continues to be the nub of the conflict today. The critical event omitted in the draft is the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the Palestinian Nakba, which continued despite the post-May Arab military intervention. (Happily, at least the latter managed to prevent Zionist forces from overrunning all of mandate Palestine in 1948.)
4) For Wertheim to suggest that the fact of Palestinian dispossession (you'll note that he can't even bring himself to use the word Palestinian, substituting 'Arab' instead) is contestable is a measure of his ideological zealotry and embrace of a long discredited historical narrative. Taking his submission seriously would be the equivalent of the Curriculum Assessment Authority taking seriously that of a flat earther with respect to the science curriculum.
Finally, here are Wertheim's suggested changes:
"We therefore suggest that the dot point be amended and broken down into two dot points so as to read: *'Ancient historical background to the conflict; the terms of the British mandate in Palestine; the UN General Assembly resolution to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab States (1947); Jewish and Arab responses, political and military. *The end of the Mandate and establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948; the military invasion by neighbouring Arab states of Israel and the territories proposed for the Palestinian Arab State; the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem; the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries and their resettlement."
My critique follows:
1) Ancient historical background? As in God promised Palestine to the Jews? Oh, puh-lease! The 1915 Hussein-McMahon correspondence, in which Britain recognised Arab independence within frontiers which included Palestine, would be more the point.
2) Terms of the British mandate? No problem there, as long as students learn how, by incorporating the 'national home' policy, the Palestine mandate violated Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant.
3) The partition resolution of November 1947? No problem there either, so long as students get to learn about the UN's refusal to refer the matter of partition to the International Court of Justice (ICJ); the sheer chutzpah of handing 56% of Palestine to a recently arrived minority colon community in defiance of the wishes of the indigenous majority population whose right to self-determination under Article 1(2) of the UN Charter was thus violated; and the Zionist-initiated pressure tactics used by the US to swing the vote.
4) Jewish and Arab responses, both political and military? Absolutely, including the Zionist forces' campaign of ethnic cleansing (which, as I've already said, was well under way before the creation of Israel in May 1948, and which continued through to at least 1950); Zionist violations of the terms of the partition resolution, including the overrruning of 22% of the area allotted to the proposed Arab state and the takeover of west Jerusalem, which was supposed to have been administered by the UN; and the overwhelming superiority of Zionist forces vis a vis both those of the Palestinian Arab community and those of the Arab states.
5) The expulsion of Arab Jews? Isn't it amazing? On the one hand Wertheim baulks at the fact of Palestinian dispossession in 1948, but construes the later Zionist campaigns of the 50s to uproot Arab Jews in Iraq and elsewhere as expulsions by Arabs. No, what would be more relevant to the unit would be a) the highlighting of Israel's adamant refusal to implement UN resolution 194, calling for the return of the Palestinian refugees, and b) the large-scale destruction of the refugees' villages by Zionist forces and the later parcelling out of their land, dubbed 'absentee property', to Jews.
This is not to say that ACARA's dot point is perfect. Far from it. Unbelievably, there is no mention of the Balfour Declaration and the circumstances in which it was issued. There is no attempt to contextualise the British mandate and the growth of the Zionist colon community in Palestine as yet another colonial-settler state in the making. Nor is there any reference to indigenous Palestinian resistance to this, in particular the Palestinian revolt of 1936-39. And how curious is the wording 'the nature of the dispossession of Palestinian lands'? The enormity of what befell the Palestinian people in 1948 cannot be swept under the carpet in this fashion: they were dispossessed of their patrimony, their homeland, their homes, lands, bank accounts, businesses - everything - and, virtually overnight, reduced to the status of impoverished, stateless refugees. ACARA's dot point gives this very short shrift indeed. To be continued...
"The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just one area of the new national draft Modern History curriculum that the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) says needs to be changed. Earlier this month, ECAJ executive director Peter Wertheim wrote to the Australian Assessment & Reporting Authority [ACARA] to suggest a number of changes and clarifications to the draft national curricula for both Modern and Ancient History. They include correcting an implication that the establishment of the State of Israel was the main determinant of the deterioration in relations between Jews and Arabs; disputing the phrase 'dispossession of Arab lands'; and questioning why the 1994 Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty plus all post-Oslo peace attempts with the Palestinians have been ommitted." (Changes required in new history syllabus, The Australian Jewish News, 27/7/12)
To see what's at stake here, nothing less than an attempt at the Zionist brainwashing of our senior history students, I thought it'd be useful to quote in full each of the draft curriculum's dot points objected to by Wertheim (to be found in the unit 'The Struggle for Peace in the Middle East'), reproduce his responses to these, and then critique both. (Please note that, for reasons of space, my critiques will perforce appear non-consecutively over the course of this month under the title above.
Here's the draft curriculum's first dot point: *The British mandate in Palestine and the significance of the establishment of the state of Israel, including the immediate consequences for relations between Jews and Arabs, the Arab-Israeli War of 1948-49, and the nature of the dispossession of Palestinian lands.
And here's Wertheim's complaint: "The first dot point allows for no historical background, conflates several distinct but important matters and draws tendentious links between different events. For example it mixes together 'the British mandate in Palestine' and 'the establishment of the state of Israel' and implies that the latter was the main determinant of the deterioration in 'relations between Jews and Arabs'. In fact, organised Arab attacks against Jews in Palestine began in 1920 and a full-scale civil war against the Jewish population was declared by the Arab Higher Committee (Palestinian leadership) and Arab League following the endorsement of partition by the UN General Assembly in November 1947, a critical event that the draft has omitted. The expression 'dispossession of Arab [sic] lands' carries with it an assumption about rightful ownership which is heavily contested and is a core issue of the conflict..."
My critique of Wertheim is as follows:
1) Mixing together 'the British mandate in Palestine' and 'the establishment of the state of Israel'? What's the problem? The British mandate was the womb from which the state of Israel emerged. Without Britain's facilitation of mass Jewish immigration and land sales to the Jews, its role in supporting the growth of a powerful Jewish militia, its refusal to grant meaningful political representation to Palestine's majority Arab community, and its vicious repression of indigenous Palestinian Arab resistance to Zionist colonization, Israel would never have come into being.
2) Of course indigenous Palestinian Arab opposition to the Zionist project didn't begin with the creation of Israel in 1948. It developed gradually as news of British support for the creation of a 'national home for the Jewish people' (in the form of the Balfour Declaration of 1917) spread among the Palestinian Arabs, and escalated in tandem with increases in Jewish immigration and land acquisition and the incorporation of the 'national home' policy into the text of the League of Nations mandate for Palestine. The indigenous Palestinian Arab population correctly saw their homeland passing into Jewish hands under the protection of British bayonets. Decrying (or expressing surprise at) Palestinian attacks on Jewish colons in such a context is akin to decrying American Indian or Australian Aboriginal attacks on the white settlers who flooded into their lands.
3) Full-scale war against the Jewish population by the Palestinian Arabs following the partition of Palestine in November 1947? This is a monstrous misrepresentation. After 1939, Zionist forces and terror gangs first turned their guns on the British mandate government, forcing the British to hand the problem they had so foolishly created with their 'national home' policy to the UN for deliberation. Then, following that body's outrageous decision to partition Palestine without consulting its people in November 1947, the Zionists turned their guns on the majority Palestinian Arab population in an attempt to secure a Jewish Palestine with as few Arabs as possible. Between December 1947 and May 1948, before the intervention of Arab armies, Zionist forces implemented their notorious Plan Dalet, systematically driving the Palestinians out of their villages, towns and cities, and creating the Palestinian refugee problem that continues to be the nub of the conflict today. The critical event omitted in the draft is the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the Palestinian Nakba, which continued despite the post-May Arab military intervention. (Happily, at least the latter managed to prevent Zionist forces from overrunning all of mandate Palestine in 1948.)
4) For Wertheim to suggest that the fact of Palestinian dispossession (you'll note that he can't even bring himself to use the word Palestinian, substituting 'Arab' instead) is contestable is a measure of his ideological zealotry and embrace of a long discredited historical narrative. Taking his submission seriously would be the equivalent of the Curriculum Assessment Authority taking seriously that of a flat earther with respect to the science curriculum.
Finally, here are Wertheim's suggested changes:
"We therefore suggest that the dot point be amended and broken down into two dot points so as to read: *'Ancient historical background to the conflict; the terms of the British mandate in Palestine; the UN General Assembly resolution to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab States (1947); Jewish and Arab responses, political and military. *The end of the Mandate and establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948; the military invasion by neighbouring Arab states of Israel and the territories proposed for the Palestinian Arab State; the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem; the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries and their resettlement."
My critique follows:
1) Ancient historical background? As in God promised Palestine to the Jews? Oh, puh-lease! The 1915 Hussein-McMahon correspondence, in which Britain recognised Arab independence within frontiers which included Palestine, would be more the point.
2) Terms of the British mandate? No problem there, as long as students learn how, by incorporating the 'national home' policy, the Palestine mandate violated Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant.
3) The partition resolution of November 1947? No problem there either, so long as students get to learn about the UN's refusal to refer the matter of partition to the International Court of Justice (ICJ); the sheer chutzpah of handing 56% of Palestine to a recently arrived minority colon community in defiance of the wishes of the indigenous majority population whose right to self-determination under Article 1(2) of the UN Charter was thus violated; and the Zionist-initiated pressure tactics used by the US to swing the vote.
4) Jewish and Arab responses, both political and military? Absolutely, including the Zionist forces' campaign of ethnic cleansing (which, as I've already said, was well under way before the creation of Israel in May 1948, and which continued through to at least 1950); Zionist violations of the terms of the partition resolution, including the overrruning of 22% of the area allotted to the proposed Arab state and the takeover of west Jerusalem, which was supposed to have been administered by the UN; and the overwhelming superiority of Zionist forces vis a vis both those of the Palestinian Arab community and those of the Arab states.
5) The expulsion of Arab Jews? Isn't it amazing? On the one hand Wertheim baulks at the fact of Palestinian dispossession in 1948, but construes the later Zionist campaigns of the 50s to uproot Arab Jews in Iraq and elsewhere as expulsions by Arabs. No, what would be more relevant to the unit would be a) the highlighting of Israel's adamant refusal to implement UN resolution 194, calling for the return of the Palestinian refugees, and b) the large-scale destruction of the refugees' villages by Zionist forces and the later parcelling out of their land, dubbed 'absentee property', to Jews.
This is not to say that ACARA's dot point is perfect. Far from it. Unbelievably, there is no mention of the Balfour Declaration and the circumstances in which it was issued. There is no attempt to contextualise the British mandate and the growth of the Zionist colon community in Palestine as yet another colonial-settler state in the making. Nor is there any reference to indigenous Palestinian resistance to this, in particular the Palestinian revolt of 1936-39. And how curious is the wording 'the nature of the dispossession of Palestinian lands'? The enormity of what befell the Palestinian people in 1948 cannot be swept under the carpet in this fashion: they were dispossessed of their patrimony, their homeland, their homes, lands, bank accounts, businesses - everything - and, virtually overnight, reduced to the status of impoverished, stateless refugees. ACARA's dot point gives this very short shrift indeed. To be continued...
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