ISRAEL/PALESTINE


Recent events have drawn further attention to the conflict between Israel and Palestine. To understand the situation - any situation, it is necessary to understand a little history. Mainstream discourse does not provide this, for reasons I touch on below. All too often any criticism of Israel is automatically labeled as 'Anti-Semetic'. But an honest appraisal of Israel's actions is not anti-semetism - it is merely honest - since Israel is not Judaism. One is a state, the other is a religion. What follows is a little history of the subject...



A NEW CENTURY


As of 1900, there was no Arab/Israel conflict. But because Jews were traditionally treated better in Muslim countries than in Christian ones - In Europe they had been persecuted for centuries - in the early Twentieth Century, tens of thousands of Jews began fleeing to Palestine.

In the word of Professor John Ruedy, “It was convenient for Zionists and their supporters to picture Palestine as a wasteland before they came.” At a 1914 meeting in Paris, Chaim Weizman came up with the slogan, “A country without a people for a people without a country.” The only problem was that many Jews arriving in Palestine were shocked to find it was full of people; Palestinians. It is likely that some Palestinians can trace their ancestry back to the ancient culture of Jericho, 6,000 years before Judaism existed.

From 1918 to 1939, the Jewish population in Palestine had increased from 60,000 to 429,605 – over 700 percent. Between 1933 and 1935 over 120,000 Jews migrated to Palestine. There was an Arab revolt. Britain sent troops to clamp down on Arab dissent. The militant Zionist group, the Irgun, which the New York Times described as a terrorist organization, carried out attacks against Arabs and British troops, setting off bombs in markets and other public places. By the time it concluded in March 1939, more than 5,000 Arabs, 400 Jews, and 200 Britons had been killed and at least 15,000 Arabs were wounded.

After World War II ended, US soldiers watched over camps full of decimated ‘displaced persons’ (DPs) waiting from the Jewish Agency to find them lands in which to resettle. In the camps, the Irgun and the Stern Gang (Zionist terrorist group) began recruiting in the displacement camps. They threatened, terrorized and brutalized the Jews who had just survived the Holocaust, to persuade them to go to Israel.

PLAN DALET


The 1948 'Plan Dalet' began, what Israelis call The War of Independence and what Palestinians call The Catastrophe. A US Army Intelligence memo stated that the combined army of all Arab forces totalled about 30,000 ill-equipped, poorly trained men. The Zionist army of over 90,000 not only outnumbered the Arabs three to one, but they had modern weaponry, including up-to-date fighter and bomber airplanes with trained pilots.

In April 1948, Zionist (Irgun) terror squads massacred 254 Palestinians in the Village of Deir Yassin. Two hundred and fifty-four Arab women, children and old men were butchered while the Arab men worked in the fields. Unborn children were killed in their mother’s stomachs. The Zionists also dynamited houses, looted and raped.

By the time the attack was over, 416 Palestinian villages were destroyed and 780,000 Palestinians fled their country in terror. Israel was three-fourths of Palestine, twice as much as the land proposed by the UN.

And so Israel was born.



WARS


In 1956 Israel attacked Egypt, demolishing it’s army in a few days. After the war, the Israelis continued slaughtering hundreds of Palestinians and stealing homes in the Gaza Strip.

The 1967 Six Day War was started by Israel - On June 5, 1967, Israel launched a preemptive attack on Egypt. However, Israel convinced the world that Arabs were the aggressors. The UN had provisionally loaned Israel 10,000 square kilometres of Palestine. By the time the Six Day War was over, Israel had taken 60,000 square kilometres, including the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the West Bank. 275 Israelis were killed in the Six Day War, 12,000 Egyptians were killed. Half a million Arabs fled or were expelled from the conquered territories.

It was around this time the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) was formed, to defend the people against Israeli attacks, as Western powers continually refused to hear the pleas of the Palestinians for aid.

In March 1978, a PLO naval commando sneaked into Israel by boat and killed 32 Israelis. Three days later, Israel sent an army of 30,000 men, backed by air power, into Lebanon. Israel’s army razed entire villages to the ground. Israel’s leaders called the ensuing massacre the ‘Stone of Wisdom.’ An American nurse working in Beirut testifies that Israel “Dropped bombs on everything, including hospitals, orphanages and…a school bus carrying 35 young schoolgirls.” In one month, more children were killed in Beirut by Israelis than during 30 years of terrorism in Israel.


MASSACRE


In September 1982, Israel hired Christian Phalangists to massace the people of the Shatila And Sabra refugee camps. Ariel Sharon said, “I don’t want a single one of them left.” Journalist Robert Fisk, one of the first to enter the camp after the militias left, gives a harrowing account of what he witnessed there:


“What we found inside the Palestinian Chatila camp at ten o’clock on the morning of 18 September 1982 did not quite beggar description…The blood was still wet on the ground. When we had seen hundreds of bodies, we stopped counting. Down every alleyway, there were corpses – women, young men, babies and grandparents…(a) child lay on the roadway like a discarded doll, her white dress stained with mud and dust. She could have been no more than three years old. The back of her head had been blown away by a bullet fired into her brain. One of the women also held a tiny baby to her body. The bullet that had passed through her breast had killed the baby too. Someone had slit open the woman’s stomach, cutting sideways. Then upwards, perhaps trying to kill her unborn child.
Everywhere, we found signs of hastily dug mass graves. Perhaps 1,000 people were butchered. Even while we were there, amid the evidence of such savagery, we could see the Israelis watching us….(Their) handiwork had clearly been observed – closely observed – by the Israelis, by those same Israelis who were still watching us through their field glasses…the Israelis themselves explained to us that this was a search for ‘terrorists’… All of us wanted to vomit.”


When asked why they were murdering civilians, a Phalangist replied, “Pregnant women will give birth to terrorists; the children when they grow up will be terrorists.”



INTIFADAS


The conflict with the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories resulted in two major Intifadas (or uprisings) Beginning in 1987 and 2000.

In the first few days of the Intifada the Israeli Defence Forces fired a million bullets and other projectiles into Palestinian lands - "a bullet for each child". Military sources confirmed a report that in one incident, a single shot, fired in the air to illustrate the reality to a European observer, evoked two solid hours of intense fire from Israeli troops and tanks. During this Intifada the ratio of deaths was almost twenty to one, (seventy-five Palestinians, four Israelis), with Palestinian military force scarcely going beyond stone throwing.


TODAY


The ongoing brutality toward Palestinians continues, even accelerates, unabashed and with full military and economic support from the US and UK - despite lip-service of weak condemnation in the media.

Palestinians have no citizenship, and are forced to undergo the humiliation of passing through checkpoints everywhere they go. Gaza and the West Bank were intentionally separated by Israel. Whole Palestinian communities are split apart by Israeli roads that Palestinians are not permitted to drive on.

Amnesty said between 180,000 and 200,000 Palestinians in West Bank rural communities have no access to running water, while Israelis fill their swimming pools in the homes stolen from Palestinians. Palestinian farmers in the West Bank, or "water pirates" as Israeli occupation forces prefer to call them, are siphoning off drinking water pipes in an effort to secure water to irrigate their farmland. Israeli snipers routinely shoot at these farmers as they attempt to cultivate the land.

Parish priest Fr Manuel Musallam reported, "The Israeli aggression has made us live like animals and our school is the zoo. There are dead bodies lying in the streets. The clinics are carrying out operations on the floor. Women have no place to give birth. One pregnant woman was shot on her way to a clinic to give birth. They tried to save the baby but it too was dead."

Prior to the December 27th 2008 attack, 14 Israelis had been killed over the last seven years, mostly by home made rockets fired from Gaza. 5,000 Palestinians were killed in the attack by Israeli forces. 80 percent of Palestinians killed were civilians; according to figures cited by the World Health Organization, at least 40 percent were children.

The attacks continue, right up to Monday's Flotilla incident.


ILLEGAL


For thirty-five years, Israel has been in breach of numerous UN resolutions, defying international law. In demanding Israel's withdrawl from the West Bank and Gaza, the Security Council used words strikingly similar to those that demanded Iraq's withdrawl from Kuwait in 1990. When Iraq did not comply, it was attacked by a US-led coalition and Kuwait was liberated. When Israel has not complied, it has received increased Western economic and military support.

The Israel 'security' barrier wall - a giant wall enclosing the West Bank, that has reduced Palestinians to a state of apartheid, was declared illegal by the UN in 2003.

The fourth Geneva Convention, instituted to criminalize formally the crimes of Nazis in occupied Europe is applicable to the Israeli-occupied territories. This has been repeatedly affirmed by over 40 UN Security Council resolutions.

The Geneva Convention makes illegal just about everything the US and Israel have done in the occupied territories, settlements, troops, it’s all illegal.


TERROR


Much media attention is lavished upon the terrorism sometimes used by Palestinians, particularly the use of suicide bombing, as though this is the cause of the problem in the region - despite the fact the first use of suicide bombing in Palestine was in 1993, after over four decades of Israeli aggression and murder. By now 'Islamic terrorism' is repeated to such an extent that the two words have become virtually synonymous.

There is now a popular phrase: "Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims." - Despite the fact that most terrorism around the globe is perpetrated by non-Muslims. In his book, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Robert Pape covered all 462 suicide terrorist attacks around the globe. Of the 41 he found in Lebanon, he was shocked to find that only eight were Islamic fundamentalists; 27 were from leftist political groups such as the Lebanese Communist Party and the Arab Socialist Union; three were Christians. The fact that many such attacks against Britain and the US have been committed by Muslims has led many in the US and UK to assume that Islamic fundamentalism must be the underlying cause. But as Pape noted, “study of the phenomenon of suicide terrorism shows that the presumed connection to Islamic fundamentalism is misleading…Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organisations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective. Most often, it is a response to foreign occupation.”

The assumption that “all terrorists are Muslims” doesn’t take into account the IRA, ETA, Tamil Tigers or US bombers such as Timothy McVeigh, and certainly not the terrorists dressed in Israeli army fatigues. Much less the most terrifying kind dressed in 5 thousand dollar business suits.

To call Israel a terrorist state in 'respectable' culture seems almost sacrilegious. But what exactly is terrorism? The US. Code of terrorism defines terrorism thus:

“An act of terrorism means any activity that (A) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life that is in violation of the criminal law of the United States or any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the juristiction of the US or of any state and; (B) appears to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by assassination or kidnapping.”

Western powers could never abide by this definition of the term. To do so would at once reveal that Israel, and it's supporter the US, are leading terrorist states. There was global effort to condemn terrorism - In December 1987 the United Nations passed its major resolution condemning terrorism in all its forms, it didn’t pass unanimously. One country abstained, namely Honduras, and two countries voted against it, the United States and Israel.

WHY?

After Israel's impressive military victory over the Arab states in the Six Day War of 1967, president Nixon defined Israel's role as that of the, "local cop on the beat," serving US interests in the region. This role became still more important after the Iranian revolution in 1979. And as the scramble for dwindling oil reserves continues, this role will continue to be important. Israel is basically an offshore base for US power. If it stopped being that, the United States would throw them in the drink with everyone else.

The virtual media blanket on Israel's blatant crimes is necessary to stop a public outcry. Powerful pro-Zionist Lobby groups such as AIPAC (The American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) and the ADL (Anti-Defamation League), work full-time to silence any dissenting voices in the chorus of support for Israel. There is also the simple fact the Israel are more Western - more like 'us'. Whereas Palestinians are different, they are 'them'. And if only those pesky Palestinians could be less crazed and excitable then this conflict could be solved. A viewpoint that could only be taken seriously, were there any kind of comparison in the military capabilities. As it stands, the 'conflict' is more like a heavyweight boxer fighting a child...with a broken arm.

Thus, Israel is funded with billions of dollars and a huge, sophisticated military arsenal - including nuclear weapons. When Palestinians fire mortars on Israeli military forces, it is reported as 'attacks on Israeli defences'. When Israel missile civilian tower blocks, it is reported as 'retaliation against insurgents'.

The tide is beginning to turn. As Israel's aggression and arrogance in flagrant disregard of international law becomes ever more transparent, people are beginning to see through the facade. The cry of 'anti-semetic' ever more hollow, as it becomes obvious that the true anti-semetics are the Zionist thugs ruling Israel.

Their violence will only incur more violence. Unless Israel changes its ways, there will be no peace in the Middle East.

Julian Gibson