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U.S., Iran, Israel, and Palestine: The Fateful Quadrangle Page 2
Israel’s future plans and why Israel has occupied 100% of Palestine against the UN Partition Plan
We now know that Israel has chosen to be an apartheid state, with Jewish minority ruling over the Arab Palestinian majority. It is necessary to understand why Israel has chosen this path, how it has been able to defy the world successfully in its genocidal policies toward Palestinians since 1948, and, most importantly, how Israel can be forced into peace. We often hear the usual excuses used by Israel to justify its aggressive seizure of Palestinian land – excuses such as Arab countries’ and some Palestinian leaders’ refusal to accept Israel’s creation in Palestine, Palestinians’ acts of terrorism against Israel, and the perceived threat to Israel’s security. These Arab actions might have contributed to hostilities between the Israelis and Palestinians but have hardly any relevance to Israel’s grand scheme of conquest and expulsion of Palestinians. If total expulsion became difficult, then colonization of Palestine was the back-up plan. Since Israel did not succeed in expelling all Palestinians, it has now made official and public its back-up plan to colonize Palestine. So far hidden from the public view this hasbeen the real reason for Israel’s expansionist colonial policies.
If Americans knew: Little-known essential historical facts about U.S. policies, Israeli atrocities, and the founding of Israel
Since the U.S. has been considered a dishonest broker in the so-called peace process and has given military, financial, and diplomatic support to Israel, even letting the Jewish state keep over 200 nuclear bombs, it is seen as the primary cause of Palestinian tragedy. In fact, the 9-11 Commission found Palestine to be the No. 1 reason for the 9-11 attacks on America. For that reason, it is essential for American citizens to know the truth about their government’s role in creating worldwide anti-America feelings and the causes of its “spectacular failure” (Avi Shlaim’s words) in all of its campaigns and operations in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. One can get factual information outside the U.S., but inside the country, because of almost complete media control, all Israel-related news has to pass through several filters, including Israel lobbies in the U.S. and the government of Israel, before it reaches the American people. A scholarly documentary titled Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land, produced by Media Education Foundation, shows exactly howpublic opinion is formed in the U.S. on all Israel-related issues. This phenomenon, singlehandedly, has been the cause of distorted and inaccurate American public opinion, which, in turn, is exploited by American politicians in order to win elections with generous financial backing by AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and other pro-Israel lobbies. Books such as They Date to Speak Out by former Congressman Paul Findley and The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt offer compelling evidence of Israeli lobby’s control of U.S. Congress and the media.
Zionists’ real intention from the start was occupying the entire Palestine
Facts about the process of Israel’s creation are also little known. The prevalent but totally false narrative (as evidenced below) has been that Israel and Palestine could have been two states if Arabs and Palestinians had accepted the UN Partition of Palestine. The truth is that Zionists never had in their plans to allow a state of Palestine to come into existence from the time that the founder of Zionism Theodor Herzl, at the end of the nineteenth century, conceived the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine in his book The Jewish State.
Israel’s Mr. Netanyahu has simply made public what has all along been the undeclared racist and exclusivist Zionist policy. Herzl envisioned a European Jewish state, not a Middle Eastern state in Palestine. That Jewish state was designed to serve as a “rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism” (Palmer 93, Alam 206). True to the racist Zionist ideology, Herzl thought that only Europeans were civilized and others were barbarians.
In view of such openly racist remarks, “Arab nationalists viewed the Jewish state as an extension of Western imperialism in the heart of the Arab world” (Palmer 93). John Esposito has also pointed out that Israel is viewed as an extension of European colonialism – “as a Trojan horse of the West” (91) in Arab heartland. Arabs saw the Zionist plan as “a dangerous imperialist bridgehead . . . in Palestine” (Shlaim 17). Following in the footsteps of Herzl, Israel’s first head of state David Ben Gurionchalked out a careful plan to take over entire Palestine by ending the U.N. Partition and ethnically cleansing Palestine of Palestinians. He repeatedly said that the Zionist leaders were accepting what the UN gave them as the down payment on the rest of Palestine.
By making use of declassified Israeli documents, Israel’s own historian Ilan Pappe and other scholars, such as Nur Masalha and Ibrahim Abu Lughod, have made some startling revelations. The world was kept mostly unaware of the Zionist plans, but they were known to Palestinians and neighboring Arab countries. That was one of the reasons why they did not accept the U.N. Partition Plan. They wanted to bring the matter before the International Court of Justice to challenge United Nations’ violation of its own principle of letting a nation decide its future through self-determination. That Palestinian move was not allowed.
Zionists’ Nazi-style brutality
Only a handful of people know about the Nazi-style planned brutality that Zionists unleashed on defenseless Palestinians. Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine debunks the myth of poor little Israel defending itself against giant Arab powers. Space does not permit more than just a few examples of Zionists’ planned expulsion of Palestinians from Palestine.This is how Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, envisioned the expulsion of Palestinians:
“We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for them in the transit countries while denying any employment in our country. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely [sic] and circumspectly” (Patai 88, Baltzer 382).
Even before the creation of the state of Israel, this is how David Ben-Gurion, the man who was to become its first Prime Minister, planned systematic expulsion of Palestinians:
“We must expel the Arabs and take their places and if we have to use force to guarantee our own right to settle in those places – then we have force at our disposal. . . . I support compulsory transfer. I do not see in it anything immoral. . . . The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war. . . . In the Negev we will not buy land. We will conquer it. . . . The debate has not been for or against the indivisibility of Eretz Israel [the “Land of Israel,” including the West Bank and Gaza]. No Zionist can forego the smallest portion of Eretz Israel. The debate was over which of two routes would lead quicker to the common goal. I have no doubt that our army will be among the world’s outstanding – and so I am certain that we won’t be constrained from settling in the rest of the country, whether out of accord and mutual understanding with the Arab neighbors or otherwise. [By “Arab neighbors,” Ben Gurion meant the neighboring Arab countries, not the Palestinians.] . . . After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine” (Italics for emphasis, Baltzer 382-383).
Albert Einstein on the Deir Yassin Massacre
In a letter published on December 4, 1948, in The New York Times, Einstein and 27 other prominent Jews condemned the massacre of Deir Yassin:
“. . . terrorist bands [i.e. Begin’s Irgun] attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants – 240 men, women, and children – and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed. . . . But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin” (Pappe 272).
Before the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, Einstein was approached by Stern Gang through American Friends of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel. He was asked for his help in raising funds for the Zionist cause. Whereas thousands of Americans gave millions of dollars as donations, Einstein chose a principled rejection. His letter of April 10, 1948, is worth quoting: “When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it the Terrorist organizations build up from our own ranks. I am not willing to see anybody associated with those misled and criminal people.”
Through many planned and brutally executed massacres of defenseless Palestinians and with the help of U.S. diplomatic, military, and economic support, the Zionists have been able to occupy the entire Palestine. Through sheer desperation and when neglected by the world, Palestinians have occasionally resorted to terrorism, which did not serve them well because it turned the world opinion against them as all acts of terrorism, including state terrorism, should do. Terrorism by Palestinians also invited the wrath of the occupying super power Israel that has continued to use F-16s, Apache helicopters, tanks, and the latest arsenal, supplied by the U.S., to kill thousands of civilians in Palestinian cities, villages, and even in refugee camps.All acts of terror are equally reprehensible. However, those committed by Palestinians come nowhere near Israel’s barbarity inmaking it a state policy to target children and civilians. Moreover, there is a huge difference between coverage of Israeli and Palestinian terrorism. In his book Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam, John Esposito describes the difference:
“While average Americans might see the latest explosive headline event such as a spectacular terrorist attack in Israel, they are not bombarded daily with images of acts of Israeli violence and brutality, the disproportionate firepower, the number of Palestinian deaths and casualties, the use of American weapons including F-16s and Apache helicopters provided to Israel and used against Palestinians, including civilians, in the occupied territories” (Esposito 154)
Systematic Zionist campaign to erase their 1948 atrocities
Public memory is short-lived, and media control wins out in the propaganda battle. Ilan Pappe points to the discrepancy between the truth and systematically orchestrated false propaganda when it comes to the matter of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948:
“. . . it is the deep chasm between reality and representation that is most bewildering in the case if Palestine. It is indeed hard to understand . . . why a crime that was perpetrated in modern times and at a juncture in history that called for foreign reporters and UN observers to be present, should have been so totally ignored. And yet, there is no denying that the ethnic cleansing of 1948 has been eradicated almost totally from the collective global memory and erased from the world’s conscience” (Pappe 9).
The Last Straw: Netanyahu’s declaration to disallow creation of a Palestinian state makes Israel an apartheid state
Netanyahu has just completed the task that Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion started to end the U.N. mandated partition of Palestine into two states. All these years since 1947, Israel has been able to hoodwink the world with U.S. connivance. A state founded on such planned genocide of the indigenous people could be seen as having abrogated its legitimacy as a state. However, even after committing numerous massacres, that have continued to the present day, Israel did have a chance, under the two-state solution, to coexist with Palestinians as a democratic state. According to Jimmy Carter’s figures in his 2006 book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, nearly 80% of Palestinians and over 60% Israelis favored a two-state solution according to the UN resolutions. Even after the latest unprovoked Israeli assault on Gaza in July 2014, a majority of Israelis and Palestinians favored the two-state solution. However, with Israeli Prime Minister’s latest categorical declaration to never allow a Palestinian state, that opportunity seems to have slipped away. Israel could have chosen the path of peace and mutual coexistence but tragically for Palestinians and for peace-desiring Jews in Palestine and elsewhere, it chose endless war, endless insecurity, and endless problems not only for Palestinians but also for innocent Jews around the world as evidenced by the rising and totally unjustified and illogical anti-Semitism everywhere. On Israel’s unfortunate choice, the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has stated that Israel has made itself a “racist apartheid state with US support”:
“Israel was in a junction where it had to decide finally whether it wants to be a democracy or to be a racist and apartheid state, given the realities on the ground. I think Israel, in 2014, made a decision that it prefers to be a racist apartheid state and not a democracy, and it still hopes that the United States would license this decision and provide it with the immunity to continue with the necessary implication of such a policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians, wherever they are. . . . [The US is] providing an unconditional support for a regime that systematically abuses the human rights and the civil rights of anyone who is not a Jew” (Pappe link).
Like apartheid South Africa where minority whites ruled over the country’s black majority, Israel has now completed the process of making itself into an apartheid state where the Jewish minority rules over the Palestinian Arab majority.
Continued on page 3 of 3 pages
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