Winter Patriot Community Blog

This is infuriating, but not surprising. The comments as well. Apparently the news organization is filtering out those comments offering support to the accused for "violating their user guidelines"
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/naturalization-passport-brother-23169...

Ahmadullah Sais Niazi of Tustin also ordered to submit to electronic monitoring when released and to surrender his passport.
...
During the hearing, Eliot entered as exhibits a picture of Niazi atop of a military vehicle from 1992 in Afghanistan, a letter from his brother-in-law with the letterhead of Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, a suspected terrorist organization. Eliot said that in an e-mail sent in April 2008, Niazi referred to the United States as an “adulteress,” referred to the rise of the Taliban and wrote, “the end is near.”

Scolnik argued that the evidence presented did not prove that Niazi is a terrorist or a danger. He said Niazi sent money to Afghanistan to care for his brother's children after he died in a car crash. The letter Niazi received from his brother on the letterhead of a suspected terrorist organization was not evidence of ties to a terrorist organization but “evidence that he keeps in touch with his family.”

The American imperial monster lives on, but now -- for far too many people -- its deadly tentacles are heavily masked.

You can read more here and/or comment below.

It's a lot like an Agatha Christie novel, figuring out this Armageddon thing. We have a crime, the bombing of Gaza. We have victims, the Palestinians. We even have the culprits, the people running the Israeli government. But are they the principal actors here? We have accomplices, the people running the US and UK governments. But, again, are they the primary motivators?

I think it is worthwhile when trying to understand a long running situation to look behind the stage props, the actors, the details of the plot and dialogue to inquire into the motivations of the writers, producers and directors of the “show”. To look for the source.

What do we know about Israeli history, culture and people? Are they autonomous or are they dependent on others or act on others instructions? We know that the Rothschild family has been heavily involved in the formation and growth of Israel; that they have provided a lot of the initial funding and have used their political clout to further the cause of Israel. It is highly unlikely that their influence over Israeli policy has waned over the years. International bankers tend to do things as a group. There are other Jewish banking families and I think it is entirely reasonable to believe they are involved with the Israel enterprise as well. When these banking families get involved in something, they like to control it and they treat everything as an investment. They have a purpose and they want a return. It's business ..... the business of the pursuit of evermore wealth and power.

The history of Israel has been one of violence from the start; a seemingly unending series of terrorist attacks and oppression against the Palestinians interspersed with wars. The Israelis have started all these wars bar one, the 1973 “Yom Kippur War”. We might conclude that they are belligerent and extremely aggressive and wont hesitate to start a war to further their interests. Why do they behave like this? The Israelis themselves have more land than they need to live in peacefully; always have. This can be simply demonstrated by the fact that they have had to aggressively promote immigration to Palestine to Jews living all over the world to populate the place. Indeed, the Israelis had to engage in “false flag” terror campaigns against the Sephardic (Oriental or Semitic) Jews living in other Middle East countries to drive them into Israel. Many claim much the same thing happened to the Ashkenazi (non-Oriental, non-Semitic) Jews in Europe through the oppression caused by the Nazis together with support from the Zionists. Historically, Jews have shown a marked resistence to immigrating during the twentieth century to Palestine as it was known prior to 1948 and to Israel as it is now known. Recently, the Israeli government has been offering large inducements to Iranian Jews to emmigrate to Israel. These have not been taken up.

Obviously there is another agenda at play here. As mentioned earlier, the principal actors here are likely to be the “International Bankers” and, if so, it is their agenda we are witnessing being played out. But first, let us return to the Israelis. How is it possible for these Jews, who have lived peacefully amongst, and as part of, a large number of other nations, to suddenly become this belligerent and warlike people?

If we look at their culture, we find it is built on ancient texts, The Hebrew Bible otherwise known as the Old Testament and the Talmud. Both these texts are exclusivist i.e. they promote the Jews as being separate from and superior to the rest of humanity. They are “God's Chosen People” which makes the rest of humanity “God's Rejected or God's Scorned or God's Enemy” and thereby the Jews' enemy. This notion of “God's Chosen” sets them up in contention with the world and if God has rejected the rest of humanity and they are now his enemy then if the Israelis attack and kill any of these same people they are doing God's work. There is no getting around this inescapable conclusion.

This world view of choseness and separateness is inculcated in Jews through their culture from birth if they happen to grow up and mix in a Jewish religious community. This is inevitable.

There are many calls for mercy and justice in the Old Testament but many of these are directed towards the disenfranchised in their own community and even when they are directed towards the benefit of the stranger it becomes confusing, contradictory. What this then requires is a sort of schizophrenic approach to these scriptures which alternatively call for mercy (Micah 6.8 ) and war (Micah 4:13) and genocide (Joshua 6:17-24). This doesn't make for a peaceful and balanced mindset. Indeed, it calls for a “splitness” in the mind to be able to function with this internal contradiction. This internal contradiction must create conflict, first internal conflict and then later external conflict

For the same reason, Christians suffer from exactly the same complaint, if not more so, as the calls for mercy and justice are even more pronounced in the New Testament. In fact, Jesus specifically rejected the priest class and its attendent legalism (the myriad of laws which, in the end, sanction wrongdoing), and the culture of violence and revenge that is such a part of the Old Testament. (See John ch8: 31-44. Jesus accuses the Judeans, known at the time as the Jews as opposed to the Israelites from Israel, as being murderers and followers of Satan. It was the Judeans who had “The Law”, the Torah, the first five books of what is now the Old Testament which called for genocide).
The answer to this mental conflict for Christians and Jews alike is to either follow the way of violence and exclusiveness or the way of mercy and inclusiveness ..... or have two minds, to split.

This cultural programming for both Jews and Christians alike lies relatively dormant until it is triggered through propaganda usually attending some crisis (also usually manufactured) and a target or victim and the means for acting out this violent disposition is provided i.e. wars against “the other”. A large number of both Christians and Jews have shown themselves quite capable of exploitation of the each other. Both groups share the Old Testament and its sentiments and both claim the title of “God's Chosen People”. Despite this competition for God's favour, many Christians and Jews have managed to unite. They have united to persecute a third group, the Muslims, specifically the Palestinians. Some very vocal Christian and Jewish leaders would have us believe that the Palestinians are not only their enemy but everybody's enemy and even God's enemy because they are resisting God's will that Palestine belongs to the Jews as outlined in the Old Testament alongside calls to genocide (See both the Books of Deuteronomy and Joshua).

As noted earlier, large sections of the populace of both countries are predisposed to violence through religious training, or programming if you like, in large part authorised and validated by leaders pointing to passages in the Old Testament. It is not only violence being advocated but a particular kind of violence: war, slavery and genocide. This is not only sanctioned by the God of much of the Old Testament, but demanded by him. This “god” cannot be the God who created the Universe and all in it because he would be at war with his own creation; at war with himself. This is not possible. If it were possible then this God would have a split mind and as God is mind/spirit without a body this means a split nature which means two Gods; a creator God and a destroyer God; a good God and an evil God. Which God was Joshua listening to when he was told to kill every living thing, man, woman, child and beast in Canaan?
(The Christian God though a three part God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, are all of the same nature. Jesus said, “You see me and you see the Father”).

A further argument that this god of genocide is not the God that created the Universe and all in it is this; if this god was the Creator God and wanted to eliminate an entire people, he could simply withdraw their life from them, he being the source of all life. This would have a huge advantage for his “Chosen Ones” in that they would not now have to murder men, women and children and be dead or uffering from injuries and/or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and nightmares and the ongoing deliterious effects of the resultant bloodlust infecting the present and subsequent generations. To command they be murderers is hardly nurturing your “Chosen People”. Once a people visit violence upon an enemy, they bring this same spirit of violence back into their own community when they return. It is now in their psyches and being denied it will fester to erupt against perceived internal and external enemies later on. The only God that would do this is one who wanted the destruction of ALL people, perpertrator and victim alike. Yet this genocidal god can't destroy by itself, it needs to employ humans to do it. If it needs help to destroy then it couldn't possibly create by itself; the defining quality that makes God God. This genocidal god, if it exists at all, is not God but some sort of other being and so should not be given any credence or authority let alone worshipped and followed.

You see the problem here? If you choose war and genocide, you are either obeying an evil, destructive being who wants to destroy you, too, or you are deluded/insane and hearing voices or just straight out evil yourself. What you cannot be is following a loving creator God.

Let us turn to the “accomplices”. Successive US and UK governments have provided taxpayer funds, armaments and political cover for Israel over many years. Both of these countries' governments have been happy to “give” the Israelis a land that belonged to neither of them. Such arrogance! Both the United Kingdom and the United States are “Christian” countries led by “Christian” men (by and large). Both these countries have long and sordid histories of colonialism and empire building, of enslaving whole peoples. Their justification .... the New Testament (go preach the good news to all the nations) and the Old Testament (appropriating the “Chosen People” title) and their methods .... straight out of the Old Testament (war, plunder and genocide). Though it must be noted that “the Good News” which was once exclusively Christianity, is now joined by “Democracy” and “Our Way of Life” (materialism/hedonism) as the religious reasons for the non-religious.

Who are we really dealing with here? Are there actors or interests behind these governments controlling them? Those that know the mechanism of credit creation, the banking system, already know the answer to this. Bankers such as the Rockefellers, Warburgs and Morgans (Christians, Jews and Calathumpians, whatever) control the country's economy by creating money they have just pulled out of thin air by extending credit (which is received as debt to the borrower). It also furnishes them with immense wealth and power over others, not the least of which are politicians and, in turn, the control of the education, legal, police and military systems. They dominate businesses including the media. Everything is channeled their way. If it is not, then they change it. They rule. They rule Britain, the US and also Israel. To see one country ruling another is to miss who is ruling them all.

However for all their power, these bankers and their attendant elite face two problems. One is that the lust for power and wealth is never satisfied. They always want more and so are always busy plotting the next expansion. As The Oracle in the film, “The Matrix” said, “What do men with power want? More Power”!
The second problem is that because their power is based ultimately on fraud, a lie, this may be discovered and then this powerbase will be taken from them.

The country's wealth that is the backing (or that which gives it value) for the bankers manufactured Money Supply belongs collectively to the citizens of the nation, not the bankers. The wealth that comes from the issuance of the Money Supply belongs to the peoples' governments. Should the truth become widely known, then these bankers risk losing all their power and perhaps even their heads. Certainly their heads were at risk when they were dealing in past years with functioning monarchies. The monarch was always liable to discover the truth to arrest them all with no notice. Monarchies were a problem for the bankers.

The First World War eliminated many of the monarchies and hobbled the rest. The First War was of great benefit to the bankers quite apart from the profits that came from providing the loans and armaments that made the war possible in the first place. But today they are still at risk of discovery and overthrow even with a non-functioning democracy. There is always the risk of it awakening and functioning as it should. So this is why totalitarian (but not hereditary) governments are prefered such as fascist and communist ones. (As an interesting aside, the only thing Marx found praiseworthy with Western capitalist countries was their banking system!)

This is the risk posed by the bankers' own fellow citizens . There is also a risk posed by any foreign government that does not use this private banking system. First it would show another system is possible and second, it would flourish. The answer to both these risks is to dominate the world to such an extent that rival countries and systems no longer exist and the populations are controlled to the point of total domination. "1984", in other words. No free thought can be allowed if the risk is to be totally negated. These people, these bankers imperfectly control, in large part, the so called Western world and somewhat more perfectly control the state of Israel. They need an increasingly police/fascist state in the West and the crushing and control of every country in the world presently outside their influence. The principle ones are Iran, Russia and China. This is the goal. All their efforts have and will be building towards this including, and especially, the creation and expansion of Israel. They need a place from which to rule. A place that is totally under their control and a place that holds significance and authority in the minds of people (including Muslims). What better place than Jerusalem?

So given all the above, I see further wars (but not their outcome) as inevitable in an attempt to hide the truth. Truth is their enemy and for good reason.
Another compelling reason (for them) to wage ever more wars is that these people have committed many many crimes. To survive prosecution and, indeed, to survive at all, they need to keep up the level of fear and preoccupation with survival for everyone else. Nothing does this better than ever more wars and terror.

So, we have two malevolent forces intent on war and both driven by power over others and both focusing on Jerusalem. One force are the adherents of a genocidal god who makes appearences throughout the Old Testament which was written some 2500 to 3000 years ago. Many of these adherents sit in churches and synagogues around the world. The other force is a financial elite of international bankers who first made their appearance on earth some 300 years ago. Both forces are being driven by the same people, the bankers, and they have launched a rollercoaster they are mentally incapable of stopping. We must put the brakes on by withdrawing our silent support.

Would we be more powerful and successful against this evil (and more at peace with ourselves) if we rejected violence and the notions of retaliation and punishment and promoted instead truth, inclusiveness, compassion and mercy as our weapons? If we acted this out by refusing employment that furthered warfare especially military service? If we helped others avoid having to do military service or manufacture weapons through poverty or the threat of poverty? By noncompliance in every form we can think of; by speaking truth at every opportunity? How else do you break this spell, that a violent God can be good, that has afflicted so many Christians and Jews alike?

If we challenged every Christian or Jew who utters exclusive, racist and violent things and asked instead, “Is this what you think your Creator God wants of you? The God who created us all?”

Or perhaps, “Why would your God want you to destroy someone he created; someone he could kill himself if he wanted to and spare you the blood on your hands and its attendant trauma?”

The Creator God cannot be violent without doing violence to himself, without splitting, as argued before. If we are made in God's image, do we then do violence to ourselves when we do violence to others? (By “violence” in this context, I mean that measure of physical force that in any way goes beyond that minimum necessary to restrain the violent from harming us.)

Can we bring violence to an end by refusing to participate in it; by refusing to support it wherever we find it being taught be it in our church, our synagogue, our club, our employment, our government?

In this essay, which needs to be relatively short, I have tried to simplify things without being simplistic. There is much else going on, of course, but I wanted to focus on something that is fundamental to this apocalyptic world situation that is not getting much attention. And also focus on where we might start to undo this situation without running the risk of exacerbating it through further violence.

I found this one book by Alice Miller on Scribd so I have added it hear for lack of a better place to put it at the moment.

For Your Own Good
by Alice Miller

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For Your Own Good - By Alice Miller

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The Myths of Zionism
by John Rose

"John Rose shows how this powerful political force is based in ancient stories and mythology: many of these stories, as with other mythologies, have no basis in fact. However, because Zionism is a living political force, these myths have been used to justify very real and political ends -- namely, the expulsion and continuing persecution of the Palestinians. Chapter-by-chapter, John Rose scrutinises the roots of the myths of Zionism. He separates fact from fiction presenting a detailed historiography of their origins and development. This includes an examination of biblical archeology, as well as a detailed exploration of Judaism's links to this particular region of the Middle East. He shows clearly that Zionism makes many false claims on Jewish religion and history. He questions its rationale as a response to European anti-Semitism, and shows that, if there is ever to be peace and reconciliation in the land of Palestine, this intellectual dishonesty must be addressed."

"A crisis stage is reached when the theories within the framework of the general thesis are unable to solve an increasingly large number of anomalies. The explanations become ponderous and inelegant, and the pieces do not lock together…This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is the fact that the united monarchy of David & Solomon which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom…" (Professor Ze’ev Herzog, 1999)

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The Myths of Zionism

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"If these activists are as dedicated as they are desperate, expect this to become a trend."

I like the title of their protest - The Predators Tour!
I wonder how long before these demonstrations turn violent? They are sure to attract some agent provocateurs.

From the Raw Story: http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Homeowners_group_protests_predator_CEO_out... Homeowner group protests 'predator' CEOs outside their mansions Stephen C. Webster Published: Monday February 9, 2009 Monday, a group of 350 to 400 at-risk homeowners, organized by the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, staged a series of protests outside the mansions of wealthy bankers in a moneyed Connecticut neighborhood. "Called the 'Predators Tour' these actions were the start of NACA's 'accountability campaign,' an aggressive, confrontational protest aimed at several top executives of companies that refuse to allow NACA to renegotiate the terms of loans on behalf of members, according to NACA CEO Bruce Marks," reported the Stamford Times. "Sporting bright yellow shirts that read, 'Stop Loan Sharks,' protesters demanded more accountability from the CEOs of the financial institutions responsible for the millions of unaffordable mortgages in the state and across America," reported NBC New York in an article titled, "Grab Your Torch and Pitchfork." Protesters also gathered outside the mansions of William Frey, the CEO at Greenwich Financial Services, and John Mack, CEO of Morgan Stanley. "The move was part of the nonprofit group's national accountability campaign to get company executives to support refinancing loans to keep people in their homes, according to Liz Floyd, one of the organizers and a counselor with the group," reported the Stamford Advocate. "... [The] group believes the executives contributed to the subprime mortgage crisis." "During the protest, organizers shouted through bullhorns and carried signs in the middle of the road for more than an hour, prompting the police to shut down a portion of Glenville Road, according to Lt. James Heavey," reported the Greenwich Times. None of the protesters were arrested, but "more than 100 signs" were left on the front gate of Frey's mansion. Lt. Heavey told the Greenwich Times that Frey was not home, and he had not returned a call from the Associated Press at deadline. "Frey was targeted, Marks explained, because he has filed a class-action lawsuit against Bank of America on behalf of two of the bank's major investors alleging that the bank violated contractual law when it moved to modify hundreds of mortgages to make them more affordable," continued reporter Amanda Norris. "Marks said that despite the risk and controversy involved in confronting millionaire money brokers on their own turf, NACA's tactics were the only effective means of exerting pressure on an otherwise uncaring and oblivious elite." The protests were just one portion of a three-day homeowners workshop put on by the NACA. The organization is setting up a "financial predators registry" of executives who did not cooperate with the group. On its Web site, CEOs of institutions such as National City, HSBC, Nation Star, HomeQ, Litton and others are prominently displayed, along with links to photos and valuations of their homes and their direct phone numbers. "'No one has ever gone in such huge numbers to these guys' homes,' Marks continued. 'If they don't do the right thing, we'll be back. We are the junkyard dogs. Once we grab on, we will not let go.'" The group's Web site explains: "Some lenders, such as Bank of America and Citigroup, have sought out NACA as a valuable partner in reaching underserved communities and have achieved great success. When lenders have exploited low- and moderate-income and minority communities, as in the case of Fleet or The Associates, NACA proved to be a tireless foe. "... Corporations prefer to hide behind a veil of anonymity, but in reality they are run by people who make decisions and are responsible for the consequences. NACA shines a spotlight on the CEOs, executives and directors who perpetrate financial injustice. NACA ensures that their neighbors, relatives and employees are made aware of their actions. In addition, NACA holds the decision-makers accountable to the public everywhere they go. NACA’s hundreds of thousands of members across the country may appear at and disrupt their speeches, events, and meetings. Backed by extensive research, NACA and its members deliver a compelling wake-up call to decision makers everywhere, letting them know that they will be held personally accountable for their actions." "Morgan Stanley said its mortgage servicing business 'actively collaborates' with NACA to structure solutions for qualified borrowers so they can remain in their homes," reported the AP. "A proposed agreement by NACA was delivered Saturday afternoon. "'We are reviewing it now and expect to come to mutually agreeable terms,' Morgan Stanley said in a statement."

This post makes some very important points. It is a translation of an article by Domenico Losurno, published on Voltairenet.org. Losurno is an Italian philosopher and historian, and a Communist, but I hope you will read his points with an open mind. It was first translated into French by Marie-Ange Patrizio.

How black legends are built
The "Protocols of the Elders of Islam"

[Introduction by Marie]

In order to justify the apartheid inside Palestine, and the Israeli war on the Palestinian people, the atlantist media resort to the usual technique of black legends. Lies upon lies end up creating the idea there would be a world-wide islamic plot with a global plan one could call "The Protocols of the Elders of Islam," in reference to the antisemitic forgery propagated by the tsarist police. The italian philosopher and historian, Domenico Losurno, analyses here this propaganda device with regard to some historical references.

[The actual text]

Leafing through the reactions to my last book Stalin, Storia e critica di una leggenda nera (Stalin, Story and critic of a black legend), I read beside largely positive comments some signs of incredulity: is it possible the infamies attributed to Stalin and accredited by a general consensus are most often the result of distortions and sometimes of complete historical falsifications ?

I would like to suggest a reflection to these very readers, in light of the events of the last days. We have under our eyes the tragedy of the Palestinian people in Gaza, first starved by the blockade and now invaded and massacred by the terrible Israeli war machine. Let us see how the great organs of "information" react. In the Corriere della Sera of december 29th, Piero Ostellino in his editorial condemns: "Clause 7 of the Hamas Charter not only defends the destruction of Israel, but the extermination of all Jews, as is affirmed by the Iranian president Ahmadinejad." We will note that, while he makes an extremely grave claim, the journalist does not offer any quote: he wants to be taken at his word.

A few days later (January 3rd) on the same newspaper, Ernesto Galli della Loggia goes at it again. In truth, he doesn't talk about Ahmadinejad anymore. Maybe he has realized his colleague's mistake. After Israel, Iran is the one country in the Middle-East hosting the most Jews (20.000), and they don't seem to suffer from persecutions. In any case, those Palestinians living under occupation could only envy the Jews standard of living in Iran, who not only have not been exterminated, but also don't have to face the threat of "transfer," which threat the most extreme Zionists project on Arab Israelis.

Of course, Galli della Loggia is way above all that. He contends himself with not saying a word on Ahmadinejad. To compensate, he goes further on another essential point: Hamas does not stop at demanding "the extermination of the Jews" of Israel, as Ostellino claims. One should not stop half-way in denouncing the barbarians' misdeeds: "Hamas wants the elimination of all the Jews on the face of the earth" (Corriere della Sera, Jan 3). In that case too, one does not begin to see a shred of evidence: scientific rigor is the last thing on Galli della Loggia's mind, whose courage in the face of ridicule must be nevertheless acknowledged: according to his analyses, the Palestinian 'terrorists' intend to liquidate the war machine not only of Israel, but even of the USA, so as to get done with the infamies, whose world-wide scale the editorialist from the Corriera della Sera denounces. Hence, those who are capable to inflict a decisive defeat to the world superpower, in addition to Israel, can very well aspire to world domination. To sum up: it is as if Galli was finally bringing to our knowledge The Protocols of the Elders of Islam !

And just like, in their time, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The Protocols of the Elders of Islam have now acquired the statute of established truth, and necessitate no demonstration. In La Stampa on January 5th, Enzo Bettiza immediately gives the meaning of the massive bombings of Israel, unleashed from the sky, the seas and the earth, using weapons forbidden by international conventions, against a population virtually defenseless: "This is a drastic and very violent police operation, from a country threatened with extermination by a sect that swore to uproot it from the face of the earth."

This thesis, repeated again and again, is inscribed in the framework of a very precise tradition. Between the 18th and the 19th century, the moderate abbey Grégoire was fighting for the abolishment of slavery in the french colonies: he was to be accused of being the leader of "blancophages", those black barbarians eager for the taste of White men's flesh. A few decades later, something similar happened in the United States of America: the abolitionists, often of Christian faith and non-violent trend, demanded "the complete destruction of the institution of slavery"; they were promptly accused of wanting to exterminate the white race. Again in the middle of the 19th century, in South Africa, the champions of apartheid were refusing political rights for blacks, arguing that a possible black government would have meant the systematic extermination of whites and white settlers in their totality.

The currently fashionable black legend is particularly ridiculous: Hamas, several times, has signaled the possibility of a compromise, if Israel accepted to get back to the 1967 boundaries. As everyone knows, or should know, what makes the two state solution more and more problematic, and maybe now impossible, is the continued expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. And yet, the substitution of the current Israel as a "State of the Jews" with a bi-national State which would be both the State of the Jews and the Palestinians, guaranteeing equality for all, would in no way comprehend the extermination of the Jews, exactly like the destruction of the white racial State, in the South of the United-Stated first, then in South Africa, certainly did not mean the destruction of Whites. In reality, those who wave, one way or another, the Protocols of the Elders of Islam want to turn the victims into executioners, and the executioners into victims.

Today's fashionable mythologies on Stalin and the communist movement in its entirety are no less grotesque and instrumentalised. Take the thesis of the "hunger holocaust", or the thesis of the "terrorist starvation", that the Soviet Union would have imposed on the Ukrainian people in the thirties. In support of this thesis, there exists, and we are offered, not a pound of evidence.

But this is not the most important point either. The black legend offered in a planified manner, especially in Reagan's time and at the time of the Cold War, serves to hide under the rug the fact that the "terrorist starvation," blamed on Stalin, has been implemented for centuries by the liberal West and, in particular, against the colonised people, or what it would have wanted to reduce to colonial or semi-colonial conditions.

This is what I have tried to demonstrate in my book. Immediately after the great black Revolution, at the end of the 18th century in Saint-Domingue/Haiti, that broke both the chains of colonial domination and those of the institution of slavery, the United States were answering through the declarations of Thomas Jefferson, saying he wanted to reduce to starvation the country that had the impudence to abolish slavery. The same behavior has been adopted in the 19th century. Immediately after October 1917, Herbert Hoover, at the time a senior official in the Wilson administration, later to be president of the United States, was explicitly waving the threat of "absolute hunger" and of "death by starvation" not only against Soviet Russia but against all the peoples ready to get contaminated by the bolchevik revolution. At the start of the 60s, an assistant to the Kennedy administration, Walt W. Rostow, was boasting about the fact the United Stated had managed to put back "decades" the economic development of the Popular Republic of China !

This is a policy that continues to this day: everyone knows imperialism tries to economically strangle Cuba, and if possible to reduce it to Gaza's condition, where oppressors can exercise their power of life and death, long before their terrorist bombings with, already, the control of natural resources.

We have thus returned to Palestine. Before they had to bear the horror he bears today, the people of Gaza had been stricken by a protracted policy that was trying to starve him, to deprive him of light, medicine, to reduce him to exhaustion and despair. In addition to the fact the Tel-Aviv government kept his right to proceed as usual, despite the "truce," with extrajudicial executions of its enemies. That is to say, even before being invaded by an army resembling a giant and experimented firing squad, Gaza was the object of a policy of war and agression. At the same time, a multi-media fire power was unleashed, especially in the West, to crush any critical resistance to the false and lying thesis according to which Israel would these days be committed to a self-defense operation: may no one question the authenticity of the Protocols of the Elders of Islam !

This is how you build the black legends: today's legend seals the Palestinian people's tragedy (the martyred people of our epoch), just like those other legends, by depicting Stalin as a monster and reducing to a criminal history the process that started with the October Revolution, mean to deprive the oppressed peoples of all hope of future emancipation.

Global Research, January 31, 2009
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=PET20090...
Israel Asserting Middle East Supremacy: From Gaza to Tehran
By James Petras

Introduction

Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany bombed, invaded and annexed countries and territories as a prelude to their quest for World Empire. Israel’s drive for regional dominance has followed in their footsteps, imitating their style: Indiscriminate aerial bombings of civilian and military facilities, a savage blitzkrieg led by armored vehicles, disdain and repudiation of all criticism from international agencies was accompanied by an open, military buildup for a new and bigger war against Iran. Like the Nazi leadership, who played on the ‘Bolshevik threat’, the Israeli high command has set in motion a vast world-wide propaganda campaign led by its world Zionist network, raising the specter of ‘Islamic terror’ to justify its preparations for a military assault on seventy-four million Iranians. Just as Nazi Germany interpreted the passivity, sympathy and impotence of the West when confronted by ‘facts on the ground’ as license for aggression, the Israeli military machine receives a powerful impetus for new wars by the Western governments’ inaction and flaccid response to its invasion of Lebanon, the bombing of Syria and now its Nazi style blitz and conquest of Gaza. For the Israeli high command, the impotence and complicity of the Western states, marks the way to bigger and bloodier wars to establish Israel’s supremacy and dominance of the Middle East, from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf.

Gaza Blitz: Dress Rehearsal for an Assault on Iran

Israel’s military victory in Gaza is a dress rehearsal for a full-scale military assault on Iran. In the course of their Gaza extermination campaign, Israeli political and military strategists gained a great deal of vital information about: (1) the levels of complicity and impotence of European, North American and Arab states; (2) the high degree and depth of material and political support obtainable from the United States government in pulverizing adversaries; (3) the high degree of internal support among the Jewish electorate for even the most brutal killing fields; (4) the massive unquestioning backing of an offensive war from all the biggest and most politically influential and wealthiest Jewish-Zionist organizations in the US and Western Europe; (5) the weakness and ineffectiveness of the United Nations and the incapacity of the entire range of humanitarian organizations to limit Israel’s extermination campaign directed at destroying the very existence of an entire people; (6) the unconditional backing of the entire mass media and news agencies in the US and most of the mass media in Europe and the rest of the world; (7) the willingness of the liberal critics to equally blame the victims of extermination and the exterminators for the ‘violence’, thus neutralizing any effective consequential condemnation of the Israeli state; and (8 ) the adaptation of practically all the journalists, writers, academics and politicians to the entire euphemistic vocabulary of the Israeli propaganda office.

For example, sustained total war is called an ‘incursion’. Ten thousand aerial assaults by hundreds of Israeli helicopters and fighter-bombers are equated with sporadic harmless homemade rocket attacks as ‘violence’. Israeli targeting of thousands of civilian homes, hospitals and basic infrastructure are labeled ‘terrorist’ targets. Resistance fighters are labeled ‘Hamas terrorists’. The bombing of the Red Cross, the United Nations relief facilities, hospitals, mosques are called ‘mistakes’ or justified as ‘launching sites for Hamas terrorists.

Israeli political leaders have drawn the lesson from their dirty little ‘war’ that they can totally destroy a nation, decimate a society and murder and maim 7000 civilians with impunity. Israeli leaders learned they can carry out an offensive genocidal war without suffering breaks in diplomatic relations (except Mauritania, Qatar, Bolivia and Venezuela). The Israelis have successfully tested the loyalty and submissiveness of the major Arab regimes in the region and secured cooperation and acquiescence from Egypt, the ‘Palestinian Authority’, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Israeli civilian-military leaders calculate that with this high degree of governmental complicity, combined with support from all the major Zionist leaders and mass media moguls, they can dismiss even large-scale street protests, repeated calls for boycotts and United Nations denunciations. Israeli leaders know that the criticism of major religious leaders and the growing number of Jewish dissidents, critical intellectuals and activists will have no consequential impact on Western governments nor lessen the fervor and loyalty of the major Jewish organizations.

Invisible Threats and Visible Impunity

The two potential threats to Israel’s genocidal offensive wars, namely, economic boycotts by important trading and investing countries and a cut-off of military aid, did not materialize. In North American the leading Zionist organizations ensured that the issue of a boycott was never even raised in the legislature and executive branches. In the US, AIPAC wrote resolutions and secured near unanimous passage (100% in the Senate, 90% in the Congress) of an AIPAC dictated resolution endorsing Israel’s invasion and slaughter. Moreover the Zionist colonized Pentagon authorized massive new shipments of missiles and 1000 pound bombs to re-supply Israel in the midst of its massacres of the Palestinians. Israel’s leaders gloated over the fact that Jewish Zionist Lobbies control over US policy went un-contested by the anti-war protestors. Few, if any, of the demonstrators around the world identified and denounced the role of the Zionist organizations in their own countries in making US, Canadian and European policy toward the Middle East.

Nothing exemplifies the total and blind subordination of the 51 Major American Jewish Organizations (see appendix #1) to Israeli foreign policy goals as two incidents during the Gaza Genocide. When the ‘51’ got wind that Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice was working to come up with a Security Council resolution calling for a cease fire in Gaza, to stop Israeli genocide, every major Jewish organization mobilized their entire membership to oppose her. As the Jewish weekly magazine, Forward, reports: “During a January 5 (2009) conference call with Jewish activists, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of President of Major American Jewish Organizations, gave special priority to blocking the international body from taking a stand on the Gaza issue. ‘We need to work hard to ensure the Security Council doesn’t pass the resolution, Hoenlein said.’” (Forward January 15, 2009)

The second example of Zionist belief in Israeli supremacy over US Middle East policy and Presidential servility came in response to Israeli Prime Minister Olmert’s boast that he successfully dictated and imposed White House policy in the United Nation. According to the Forward: “Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert didn’t do anything wrong but he should have kept his mouth shut. That was the reaction of several Jewish leaders…’I have no problem with what Olmert did’, said Abraham Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League.” (Forward, January 15, 2009) Former AIPAC chief lobbyist Douglas Bloomfield, stated that he (an American citizen) had no problem with Israel dictating US policies but ‘it is a mistake to talk about it.’ (Forward, January 15, 2009). By talking about Israel’s power in Washington, it exposes the role of the Zionist Power Configuration in deciding US policies.

These examples demonstrate once again the indivisible links between Israel and its US-Zionist Fifth Column and their power to make US policy – even when it is a question of supporting genocide. These cases also illustrate the fact that the major American Jewish organizations will not tolerate the smallest White House deviation from any Israeli policy, even if it involves mass murder. It wasn’t enough that for 8 years, President Bush slavishly followed and funded Israel’s war machine: For US Jewish leaders it is 100% subservience up to and including his last day in office. As the Forward writes, “That tough words from Israel and the Jewish groups…serve as a message to the incoming (Obama) administrations…” (ibid).

In addition to capturing positions of political power, one of the highest priorities of all the major Zionist Jewish organizations in the US is to propagandize, apologize and fabricate stories on behalf of Israel. Even in the face of Israel’s most blatant violent crimes against Palestinians, condemned by the UN General Assembly, the International Red Cross and every humanitarian group, the principle American Jewish religious institutions and lobbies have demonstrated their loyalty to the state of Israel. The modus operendi as documented by their internal memos is to dominate the mass media through ‘plants’ – pro-Zionist journalist, academics, ‘experts’ and editors – who write and broadcast justifications and apologies for Israeli war crimes (parroting the line of the Israeli state) in the mass media. The Zionist propagandists then circulate the planted articles by their colleagues, giving the impression of broad public support when in fact they are reproducing prepared Israeli-Zionist propaganda. The style and substance of the Zionist propaganda operation is evident in its defense of Israel’s Gaza bloodbath. The style is the Big Lie, reminiscent of totalitarian regimes. It is worthwhile to sample a few examples from the main mouthpiece of the 51 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO):

1. Denying Israeli war crimes and fabricating accounts minimizing the Jewish State’s killings. The Daily Alert (January 22, 2009) claimed that Israel killed only 600 Palestinians and “most were fighters.” The Daily Alert denied on site reports by major human rights workers, Red Cross officials, Palestinian and international doctors and medical workers and journalists, who risked their lives (and some died) documenting the nearly 1,400 deaths, over 2/3 of which were children, women and non-combatants.

2. Repeating Israeli propaganda justifying the bombing of the United Nations-run schools by claiming the schools were ‘infiltrated by Palestinian terrorists’ among the thousands of refugees (The Daily Alert, January 22, 2009). There was not a single armed resistance fighter found among the 40 bodies recovered from the rubble by the United Nations workers, International Red Cross and Palestinian medical crews at the girls’ elementary school; all were children, teachers and refugees. Every organization and individual eyewitness refutes the Zionist-American apology of the Israeli bombing of the school, including the entire European Union. The most bizarre fabrication printed in the Daily Alert is a headline, which read: “Hamas Shot from Civilian Neighborhoods” over an article by Rod Nordland (Newsweek), which, in fact, reports the opposite, “Everyone of the residents interviewed in eastern Jabeliya insisted that there had been no provocation from the area, no resistance fighters and no rocket launchings.”

3. The third lie is a whopper: “Israel Doing its Best to Help Gazans”, (Daily Alert, January 16, 2009). In fact, Israel blocked all medicine and medical equipment from entering Gaza, bombed hospitals, shot up ambulances, murdered doctors and medical aid workers and blocked all shipment of water, food and fuel. The Israelis bombed the main United Nations food and medical supply warehouse, destroying its entire contents. The US Zionists defended this bombing by citing Olmert’s blood libel that the destruction of thousands of tons of food was a “response to fire coming from the building.” The United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon was outraged by this barefaced lie as he visited the still smoldering UN warehouse to view the destruction while the US Secretary of State Rice crawled before the Israelis, begging them to “avoid (a repeat of) such incidents.” (Daily Alert, January 16, 2009)

4. “Saving Gaza by Destroying the Heart of Terror” (Daily Alert, January 16, 2009). The Jewish propaganda sheet reproduces an article by the ultra-nationalist Natan Sharansky, who advocates expelling all Palestinian Arabs from ‘Greater Israel’. In an article published in Bloomberg, Sharansky defended the destruction of over 10,000 houses, damaging over 40,000 homes, roads, hospitals, power installations, water and sewage installations, 121 industries and commercial workshops, 30 mosques, 29 educational institutions, farms, poultries, dairies, small fishing vessels and the fishing port (according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights and cited in Stephen Lendman’s essay, “Israel Killed Everything but the Will to Resist”, January 25, 2009).

5. The Fifth Big Lie: “Israeli Pilot Tries to Avoid Hitting Civilians”, (Daily Alert, January 14, 2009). Photos published in all the international mass media refute this Zionist propaganda claim. The ghostly rubble of whole apartment blocks resembles a nuclear strike or an earthquake, according to the BBC reporters who finally made it into Gaza. Numerous European Parliamentary representatives and other on site visitors from throughout the world were shocked by the devastation. Not only did Israeli pilots target all civilian targets, but their ground troops assassinated unarmed civilians holding white flags and in some cases even small children attempting to flee. Surviving Palestinian children tell of their fathers executed in front of their families.

The Big Lie promoted by the leading Zionist organizations resonates from the Rabbinical pulpits, to their members and beyond: Informal phone surveys with rank and file members of local Zionists groups echoes the same lies and apologies, almost verbatim. In a word, neither facts, nor reports, nor universal condemnation, nor challenges by dissident rabbis, Jewish notables, writers and activists have made a dent on the major Jewish organizations and their agents in influential positions in the new Obama administration. They are the willing accomplices to mass murder in Gaza. They are active promoters of a pre-emptive aerial assault on Iran. They will unconditionally apologize for any crime against humanity that Israel perpetrates. Their academic apologists at Harvard defend Israeli Genocide as part of a ‘Just War’. In the face of universal condemnation they continue to cite the Holocaust and claim that they and their State are the only Moral People entitled to decide and judge, what is just and what is sacred Truth.

The Israeli leaders are perfectly aware of the ‘free hand’ with which their ‘Fifth Column’ operates, up to and including their prominent role in defense of genocide. Israeli leaders are assured that even when they launch a bigger, bolder and more destructive war (including the possibility of pre-emptive nuclear strike) against Iran or Syria/Lebanon, they can count on the million-member US Zionist lobby securing White House and US Congressional support. Israeli leaders now know for a fact that the anti-war movement will once again engage in inconsequential protests against the ‘shadows of power’ and not the real power wielders embedded in the Zionist Power Configuration.

Gaza: Testing the Subservience of the US Congress and the White House

By savaging Gaza with extreme brutality, Israel is testing the waters of US support for more offensive wars. Gaza allowed the Jewish leaders to measure the depth and scope of US Zionist political influence and their willingness to ‘go all the way’ when Israel decides to bomb 74 million Iranians in to the stone age. Or as the famous Israeli Zionist historian, Benny Morris, suggested in the New York Times July 18,2008, turn Iran “into a nuclear wasteland”.

Prime Minister Olmert’s public boasting that he pulled President Bush off the stage from an official public appearance and successfully ordered him to instruct the Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice to abstain from voting on her own authored resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza before the Security Council has many profound meanings. On the most obvious level Olmert’s revelation confirms the power of Israeli leaders over the White House. Secondly, the public nature of the exercise of power, tells the world that Israel can openly flaunt its capacity to humiliate and ridicule the President of the United States and later brag before Israeli officials with no adverse consequences. Thirdly it tells us that Israel has a greater say in US foreign policy than the American Secretary of State (or Foreign Minister). Fourthly it tells us that Israel decides how the US behaves, votes, vetoes and abstains in the Security Council, subject to Israeli approval.
Israel, the Zionist Fifth Column and Iran

Israel exercises power in the Middle East through its military weaponry. Its repeated threats and aerial and ground assaults on neighboring countries is a deliberate strategy to assert its regional supremacy. In recent years, Israel’s regional power has been enhanced by the Zionist Power Configuration in the US and Canada, who use the armed forces in their own countries to destroy any country that contests Israeli military supremacy. The classic case was the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq and the follow-up occupation, in which long-term Israel Firsters in the US Government played a deadly role in promoting the war.

From the late 1980’s to the present, the US Zionist Power Configuration has been in the forefront of a campaign to promote a US military confrontation with Iran in collaboration with Israel. The Zionist military proposals gained tremendous momentum during the 8 years of the Bush Administration. The ZPC mounted an unrelenting mass media propaganda campaign demonizing Iran, fabricating and disseminating falsified accounts of its nuclear programs, infiltrating and occupying key positions in the US Treasury Department (led by Stuart Levey) aggressively bludgeoning other governments, industries, banks and investors to boycott Iran. Zionist Treasury Department officials hope to strangle and weaken Iran’s economy in order to soften it up for a military strike. No other single or combined force in North America, or, for that matter, any place in the world (except Israel) has played as big a role in promoting an offensive war against Iran as the Zionist politicians and officials in the US government. They were aided and abetted by Jewish lobbies, Zionist propaganda centers, multi-billionaires and hundreds of Jewish community organizations.

Major Jewish religious organizations play a very influential role as conduits of Israeli propaganda and are an important force within the principle Zionist umbrella organizations (e.g. Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations or CPMAJO). Fully one-fifth of the Conference (see appendix for a full list)1 is made up of clerical-Zionist organizations, whose principle function is promoting Israeli goals through direct intervention in US politics at all levels. A memo from one group, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, issued on January 3, 2009, outlines their detailed strategy in defense of Israel’s Gaza massacre: “Every congregation should issue a statement supporting Israel. Solicit statements from elected officials at the city, state or provincial, or federal levels. Solicit statements from local religious, ethnic and other prominent personalities. Monitor and respond to media coverage. Whenever possible, enlist non-Jews as well as public officials and prominent spokespeople to demonstrate their support for Israel.” The memo then proposes a series of “talking points on the situation in the Gaza Strip” that repeats verbatim the identical propaganda fabrications of the Israeli political-military high command: Affirming Israel’s peaceful intentions, blaming Hamas as the aggressor and claiming that “Israel, as always, is doing everything within its powers to limit non-combatant casualties in Gaza.” The Jewish clerics in the United Synagogues tell their faithful congregants to ignore the more than 5000 civilian casualties and the 1,300 deaths, of which three quarters are women, children and unarmed civilians, the sixty schools and the tens of thousands of homes and the dozen mosques demolished, the condemnations of war crimes by the United Nations, Red Cross and every Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups.

The strategy paper issued by the religious Conservative Jews is very similar to that followed by the entire network of 51 religious and secular groups affiliated with the ‘Presidents’. This highlights the way in which a highly disciplined, well-financed minority captures and multiplies its power far beyond its own membership, ‘leveraging’ influential Gentiles, the mass media at all levels and public figures into a powerful juggernaut in defense of Israeli genocide in Gaza today and for war against Iran tomorrow.

Israel’s Military Threat to Iran

Israel, contrary to some leftist skeptics, had advanced operational plans to launch a massive aerial assault on Iran. On several occasions in the recent past, Israel has planned several aerial attacks on Iran, only to be thwarted by the Bush White House. The Jewish state has publicly announced that it will unilaterally strike Iran if it continues its legal, internationally recognized, right to enrich uranium. The most likely winner in this February’s national elections, Binyamin Netanyahu, has publicly stated that a military attack on Iran is at the top of his agenda – a message which has activated all the major Zionist-Jewish organizations in the US to redouble their efforts to secure US compliance, support and active collaboration. On January 7, 2009 The London Sunday Times, quoting several high level Israeli military sources, reported that, “Israel has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons. Two Israeli Air Force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear ‘bunker-buster’…Robert Gates, the new (sic) US Defense Secretary, has described military action against Iran as a ‘last resort’ leading Israeli officials to conclude that it will be left to them to strike. The preparations have been overseen by Major General Eliezar Shkedi, Commander of the Israeli Air Force.” (Times on Line, January 7, 2009). A subsequent article in the pro-Israel New York Times (January 11, 2009) by David Sanger, a prominent Zionist sympathizer, reported that “President Bush deflected a secret request by Israel last year (2008) for specialized bunker-busting bombs it wanted for an attack on Iran’s main nuclear complex…the Bush administration was particularly alarmed by an Israeli request to fly over Iraq to reach Iran’s major nuclear complex…The White House denied that request outright.” Sanger goes on to claim that the Israelis were furious at a detailed report by 16 US intelligence agencies (The National Intelligence Estimate) which demonstrated that Iran had halted development of a nuclear warhead in 2003 because it undermined Israeli efforts to secure US collaborations for a military attack on Iran. Sanger spends several paragraphs trying to bolster the Israeli unsubstantiated claims regarding Iran’s nuclear program framing the case for a unilateral Israeli attack…which he dates began “early 2008” but was stalled by opposition from the US military.

The forthcoming Israeli national elections (February 10, 2009) promise to accelerate Israeli plans for a massive military assault on Iran, as the polls indicate that the majority of Jewish voters will elect the ultra-militarist Zionist Binyamin Netanyahu, a favorite of the most influential Zionist-American organizations. In a very recent interview with the Wall Street Journal (January 24, 2009), Netanyahu speaks of Iran as the ‘terrorist mother base” and “that Israel cannot accept an Iranian terror base (Gaza) next to its major cities.” He then goes on to justify the Israeli murder of civilians because, he claims, the Palestinian resistance (“terrorists”) “hide behind civilians”. The Wall Street journalist, one Brett Stephens, in complete awe and wonder at the feet of the Israeli leader, writes approvingly of Netanyahu’s justifications for an attack on Iran, “the threat of a nuclear Iran poses a much greater danger to the world than the economic crises…this poses an existential threat to Israel directly…” Stephens goes on to sum up Netanyahu’s position toward Obama: “If diplomacy fails and the US does not resort to military force, Israel will decide to go it alone…”

Israeli leaders have temporarily backed off attacking Iran – launching, instead, the Gaza assault to weaken any possible resistance among Palestinians to an Israeli war against their Muslim ally in Teheran. The Israeli war plans toward Iran will be reinforced with the new Obama Presidency. With the rise to power of the ultra-Zionist Dennis Ross as Chief Adviser on to President Obama on Iran and Hillary (“We will obliterate Iran”) Clinton as Secretary of State, the question of a US backed Israeli preemptive attack on Iran looms closer to becoming a reality. As late as two months ago Ross signed on to a document, which provided a ‘roadmap’ to war with Iran. Zionist infestation of the entire policy-making apparatus of the Obama regime means that any official military or intelligence opposition to an Israeli attack on Iran will be blunted and their spokespersons marginalized.

The Obama Regime and Israel

The Obama regime is, if anything, even more penetrated from the top to bottom and from Executive offices to Congress with Zionists in positions to influence every strategic decision having any relation to Middle East policy.

The Jewish Telegraph Agency (January 20, 2009), the principle news agency of American Jewish-Zionist publications, provides a detailed list of the ‘pro-Israel’ Zionists in strategic Middle East positions in the Obama regime. The evidence of Zionist control is overwhelming and the consequences are deadly to any ‘balanced’ peace negotiations and extremely promising for Israel’s war ambitions in the regions:

1. Dennis Ross will be an influential adviser on Iran policy. Ross is an advocate of intensifying sanctions to undermine negotiations and force the military option.

2. Richard Holbrooke, appointed as Obama’s envoy to Afghanistan, is a prominent Zionist who served as UN envoy under Clinton. He has recently headed an ad hoc group called United Against a Nuclear Iran, which advocates military action against Iran if it does not submit to an Israeli-dictated cessation of its legal nuclear energy program.

3. George Mitchell, Obama’s envoy to the Palestine-Israel conflict, is one of the four co-chairs of the Zionist front group, Bipartisan Policy Center, which propose a step by step approach, from sanctions to embargo to naval blockade to a military strike on Iran.

4. Dan Shapiro and Puneet Talwar will collaborate on Middle East policy at the National Security Council. Shapiro, in consultation with Israel, was “key in shepherding the Syrian Accountability Act through the Senate (a measure that imposed tough sanctions on Syria). Shapiro drafted Obama’s cringing, belly crawling speech to the AIPAC conference in Washington on May 2008. Puneet Talwar will handle Persian Gulf issues – including Iran. He was a staffer of former Senator and current Vice President Joe Biden and was a close collaborator and conduit for AIPAC.

5. Eric Lynn is heading for a White House Middle East policy job. He started his career as an AIPAC intern in 1998 and continued as a staff person for Congressman Peter Deutsch, “one of the most committed pro-Israel figures in Congress.” Lynn spent a year in Israel, imbibing Zionist military culture and learning Hebrew.

6. James Steinberg and Jacob ‘Jack’ Lew have been named as Clinton’s deputies at the State Department. Steinberg has been in a ‘strong relation with the pro-Israel community’ and was a conduit for Israeli pressure on Arafat to capitulate to Israeli demands. Jack Law will direct economic stimulus overseas. He is an orthodox-Zionist, who will use American economic resources to back Israeli militarism and reward or punish its adversaries. A former head of a Citigroup investment unit, he holds between $50,000 to $100,000 in Israel State Bonds.

7. Samantha Power, once a critic of Israeli war crimes in 2002 for which the Zionist Power Configuration had her removed from the Obama campaign in March 2008. She was ‘rehabilitated’ and re-incorporated as a member of the Clinton transition team after an ‘abject apology’ to Israel.

8. Cass Sunstein, a lifetime Zion-Lib, is head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs – a key propaganda arm of the Obama regime.

9. Rand Beers was lead national security adviser to Senator Kerry during his presidential campaign of 2004 and ‘built close relations’ with the pro-Israel political apparatus. As adviser to Homeland Security, he will ‘likely be a linchpin as Israel and the US forge a closer alliance’ (Jewish Telegraph Agency January 20, 2009).

10. Lee Feinstein and Mara Rudman are Zionist veterans from the Clinton Administrations. Feinstein is a lead adviser of Secretary of State Clinton and Rudman is Senior Foreign Policy Adviser of President Obama.

11. Susan Rice, UN Ambassador appointed by Obama, signed on to a Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) paper last summer calling for greater Israeli-US coordination for an embargo and military attack on Iran. WINEP is a well-known propaganda mill for Israel’s most fanatical, bellicose and unconditional supporters. In her Senate testimony, Rice denounced the United Nation General Assembly’s criticism of Israel’s Gaza bloodbath.

At the head of Obama’s foreign policy regime, Vice Presiden Biden (“I am a Zionist”), Secretary of State Clinton (“demolish Iran”) and Secretary of Defense Gates (a holdover from the Israeli-dominated Bush Administration) have put in place the most Zionist-infested Middle East policy regime in US history. This regime is neither by background, loyalties or commitments prepared to open serious negotiations with Iran, or to ‘broker’ an end of Israeli occupation of Palestine. On the contrary, their close ties with the Zionist Power Configuration and long-term commitment to Israeli militarism and expansionist policies ensure that the Obama regime will proceed toward collaboration with the Jewish State in a military confrontation with Iran. Everyone on Obama’s team supported the Israeli carnage in Gaza and endorsed Israel’s efforts to destroy the democratically elected Hamas government and prop up the discredited and corrupt quisling clique headed by Abbas.

The Obama Presidency has achieved what many observers thought impossible: It has placed more Zionist in more strategic power positions with a greater commitment to war with Iran than even the Bush Administration. Given Obama’s appointments and his own personal subservience to Israeli leaders it is difficult to imagine the 16 major intelligence services issuing a report refuting Israel’s fabrications about Iran’s nuclear program, as happened under Bush. Even more egregious, given the Zionist stranglehold on the White House, it is unlikely that Obama would block a proposed Israeli air assault on Iran as Bush is reputed to have done.

The Israeli war strategy toward Iran follows the ‘salami tactics’ of its Nazi forerunner: Attacks are designed for maximum destructiveness against civilian infrastructure, against countries and leaders opposed to any Israeli aggression toward Iran. Israel bombed and invaded Lebanon. It bombed Syria. Israel savaged Gaza. Its ‘lobby’ has extended and enforced global economic sanctions through the forceful intervention of a Zionist infested Treasury Department. Obama’s top economic adviser, the ultra-Zionist Lawrence Summers, promotes tighter sanctions, boycotts and embargoes against the designated enemies of Israel: policies pointing toward war.

‘Peace’ Negotiations Geared Toward War

The likelihood that the Obama regime will move the world closer to an offensive war with Iran is not based on idle speculation or selected quotes from his presidential campaign. No one can take serious President Obama or his Secretary of State Clinton’s advocacy of ‘negotiations with Iran’, when they are accompanied by conditions unacceptable to Iran’s sovereignty or national interests. The Obama regime openly threatens war if Iran does not accept unilateral disarmament with intrusive inspection of its strategic defense installations, allowing Israel and the US a unique opportunity for pinpointing vital targets for their first wave of attack.

What conclusively demonstrates Obama’s drive to war with Iran is his appointment of the most zealous Zionist militarist, Dennis Ross, to the key strategic position dealing with Iran.

Obama appointed Ross to the post of ‘Special Envoy to Iran’. He will act as Czar of Middle East policy. George Mitchell is his envoy on Israel-Palestine negotiations, a typical ‘good cop’ (Mitchell) strategy to counter the ‘bad cop’ (Ross). Ross, who is often called ‘Israel’s Lawyer’, is the ultimate Zionist, a crown prince of the US Zionist Jewish Lobby in all of its major undertakings regarding Iran. Ross is a founding leader of AIPAC, the principle and most powerful Israel First Lobby in Washington. He has been a lifelong and influential ZionCon ideologue, who successfully led the campaign in favor of the invasion of Iraq. He is among the most prolific and influential writers and propagandists at the Zionist-financed propaganda mill, WINEP (Washington Institute for Near East Policy), which has produced the most bellicose position papers pushing US military intervention in favor of Israel’s expansionist ambitions. During the Clinton years, Ross was appointed head of the US ‘mediation’ committee during the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations (1999-2000). In that position, he acted as ‘Israel’s lawyer’ according to a fellow US Zionist diplomat. He scuttled all possibility of any acceptable compromise by “following Israel’s lead.” He set up the conditions, which made Palestinian rejection inevitable while placing the blame on that embittered people. Ross has a profound influence on Obama’s politics to Israel.

Ross is a leader in a relatively new Zionist front group, known as the ‘Bipartisan Policy Center’. The ‘Center’ recently published a report entitled, “Meeting the Challenge: US Policy Toward Iranian Nuclear Development.” This roadmap for war with Iran was produced by a task force, which included Ross and two other extremist Zioncons, the dual-Israel-US citizen Michal Makovsky and Michael Rubin. Ross’ endorsement of the ‘Report’ reflects his rejection of any possibility of a negotiated agreement with Iran, which would accept Iran’s legal right to a uranium enrichment program as recognized by international treaty.

A recently reported wrinkle in Dennis Ross’ appointment to the Obama Cabinet is his role as current Chairman of the Jerusalem-based Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, under the Jewish Agency, which is an official part of the Israeli Government. His current work for an Israeli government agency could place Ross at odds with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a Federal statute that requires individuals working on behalf of a foreign government to register as such - something Ross has never done.

The ‘Report’ advocates a preemptive Israeli aerial bombing and missile campaign against Iran should the US and Europe fail to strike first. This Dennis Ross-endorsed ‘Report’ proposes a total naval and air blockade and embargo of Iran as a prelude to a US attack on Iran’s vital infrastructure. This document called on Obama to ‘bring in troops and material to the region under the cover of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, thus maintaining a degree of strategic and tactical surprise.’ In other words, Obama’s forthcoming appointment of Ross to head his regime’s Middle East Policy Advisory Group places an unconditional advocate and promoter of genocidal war with Iran in a key strategic foreign policy position.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Dennis Ross will do everything in their power to promote and justify a US-Israeli joint attack on Iran. Ross and Clinton will begin with phony negotiations based on unacceptable ultimatums. This will be followed by acts of war in the form of Gaza style embargos designed to starve and impoverish the people of Iran, and conclude with a Gaza-style aerial blitzkrieg. Given the extraordinary number of Zionists appointed by Obama in every key level of his government, the possibility of any internal debate or dissent over the Ross roadmap for war in Israel’s interest is minimal. Obama has put together a policy-making elite so closely linked and loyal to the Israeli military that it precludes any type of meaningful negotiations with Iran.

Possible External Constraints on Zionist-Israeli-US War on Iran

The only effective deterrent to a Gaza style Israeli assault on Iran is Teheran’s capacity for military retaliation, especially accurate long-range missiles capable of reaching Israel’s principle military sites, infrastructure and related support systems. Given the Israeli leaders lack of any moral constraints and their immersion in a militarist ideology, in which brutal force and widespread violence are the primary means of projecting power and securing Israeli public support, a costly massive military counter-attack is probably the most effective deterrent to force its leaders to reconsider Israel’s military-driven foreign policy.

While Israeli militarists adopt a ‘defensive’ rhetoric, their strategy is to weaken Iran’s defense capability and make it more vulnerable to military threats and diplomatic pressure in a lead-up to a pre-emptive aerial assault. International inspections by United Nation agencies are only carried out of Iranian sites but not of US regional military instillations, including their nuclear-armed war ships and submarines, or of Israel’s nuclear weapons sites and nuclear weapon laboratories. The one-sided inspections provide a wealth of information on Iranian military capacity and defense locations and of advanced strategic research laboratories. UN inspections prior to the US invasion of Iraq identified key defense installations and Iraqi scientists, their places of work and homes, which were used in bombing missions and the subsequent assassination campaign against top Iraqi scientists. This kind of information was crucial in guiding Israel’s bombing and missile assaults and assassination of leaders and their families during its invasions of Lebanon and Gaza.

The Israeli dictated and US Zionist implemented economic boycott of Iran is clearly directed toward undermining both Iranian living standards and the performance of their economy, similar to what the Jewish state imposed on Gaza. It is part of the ‘softening up’ campaign prior to its all out attack.

To day however, despite a sustained effort by all top Zionist functionaries in the US government and the intense pressures of its lobbies on US pension fund managers, the embargo has not crippled the Iranian economy. Especially with the onset of the recession, the decline of world markets and the growing energy demands of China, there are numerous Western and Asian multinationals eager to trade with Iran and to ignore Israeli and US Zionist pressures.

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has finally forced important cracks in the overseas Zionist monopoly over Jewish opinion. The leading Jewish communal organizations and their spiritual spokespeople continue to support each and every crime from the bombing of Red Cross ambulances and clinic to United Nations schools, food and medical supplies warehouses and refugee centers. This has finally provoked vigorous opposition among leading Jewish intellectuals, writers and other professionals.

New organizations and personalities have emerged within the Jewish community, which have forcibly repudiated Israel’s genocide. Some Jewish activists have taken bold direct actions, occupying Israeli consular offices in a few major cities and calling for a total boycott of Israeli goods and academic exchanges. Others have confronted Zionist apologists in public forums and press conferences. While the number and influence of Jewish critics of Zionist war crimes is small, their importance is found in giving legitimacy and encouraging millions of otherwise intimidated and silent Gentiles to ‘come out’. As a result, an unprecedented number of people in the West have voiced their horror and opposition to the Zionist military juggernaut and expressed their support for economic boycotts against Israel. While Jewish and Gentile mass opposition neither stopped or weakened Israel’s massacre of Gazan civilians, it has laid the political and organizational basis to launch a massive campaign against the US Zionist war plans against Iran.

Israel’s military successes have created an irrational triumphalist war fever among all of its leaders and their enthusiastic supporters in the million member Jewish-Zionist organizations in the US. This has led them to underestimate the catastrophic costs of a war with Iran. An Israeli-US sneak attack on Iran will unleash major military and political retaliatory action throughout the Middle East. This will certainly inflict major human, military, political and economic losses on many US military installations in the Gulf region. This is especially the case in Iraq and the adjoining client Gulf States, where US military forces are highly vulnerable. An Israeli assault might lead to the destabilization or overthrow of Arab client states. Moreover, Iran may retaliate by successfully launching accurate long-range missiles, which will target major Israeli military complexes and adjoining population centers.

Given the enormous worldwide disgust and horror at Israel’s war crimes in Gaza and the hatred evoked by the prospect of new aerial assaults on millions of Iranians, Tehran’s reprisals against Israel and the US are not likely to raise much condemnation. More likely, most people will feel a sense of righteous vindication, that finally the arrogant bully is finally getting paid back for its assaults on unarmed, imprisoned civilians in Gaza. Just as the British survivors of Nazi V-2 rocket attacks on English population centers cheered the firebombing of Dresden, vast sections of public opinion may greet an Iranian retaliatory strike on Israel as a valid deterrent for its serial atrocities against humanity.

One of the most effective threats to Israel’s genocidal war drive is the launching of investigations into Israeli war crimes, the establishment of tribunals to try Israeli military and political leaders for their crimes against humanity (Financial Times, January 16, 2009 page 5). Israeli leaders have advised their soldier-criminals they will be provided with legal protection. The leaders have expressed concern that they themselves may be subject to citizen arrests and tried by overseas courts. Several governments are filing war crimes charges before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The problem with laying charges on Israeli war criminals is where to draw the line between military-political leaders who directed the war crimes and the field officers, who implemented the policies violating the Geneva Conventions. For example, identifying the officials who specifically barred medical and emergency workers for over four days from evacuating wounded and starving civilians, including small children, from the site of a horrific Israeli massacre of Gazan civilians. What about the great masses of Israeli Jewish citizens who were so elated by the bombing of whole civilian neighborhoods that some Israelis set up observation posts with picnic baskets to survey the ongoing carnage? The same Israelis “delighted in the images, splashed across the front pages, of smiling Israeli soldiers riding homes on tanks in victory post.” (Financial Times, January 26, 2009). Mass Israeli elation, political intoxication and embrace of the perpetrators of the killing of unarmed people may be repugnant to world opinion, but it is nor a sufficient offense to merit an international tribunal. However it is subject to the same moral repudiation, which many of us felt toward the German people who celebrated Hitler’s savage bombing of Soviet, Polish and Balkan cities. Even if the Zionist-controlled White House succeeds in using its veto on the United Nations Security Council to prevent a war crimes investigation of Israeli leaders, the presentation of charges and possible arrests in several European countries will force the Israeli leaders to reflect on their pariah status and might inhibit their push for a murderous war with Iran. We have included a list (see Appendix #2) of the names of Israeli military leaders, their rank and operational role and responsibility for war crimes in Gaza.

Israelis currently dismiss out of hand the opprobrium of world opinion as irrelevant to its ongoing military offensive. This causes the Jewish state to overlook the importance of world opinion in eroding strategic political support in the future. Many observers believe hundreds of millions of Arab citizens and multitudes of non-Arabs and non-Muslims are coming to believe that Israel and its overseas Zionist Fifth column will only understand the language of force since they routinely practice state terrorism to impose their interests on captive, impoverished people. As a result, many analysts argue that it is understandable that the weapons of choice for the victims of Israel will inevitably rely on sustained, organized and militarized people’s resistance. In these circumstances the current crop of anemic, impotent, collaborationist Arab leaders and regimes may be overthrown and a new combative and consequential leadership could emerge, one which consults and draws its mass support from the deepest feelings of national dignity and profound hatred of Zionist imposed humiliations.

Conclusions

Israel’s Gaza war is leading its leaders and its strategically placed overseas agents in the US political system to overreach and to pursue a new war with Iran, as part of a regional strategy to secure imperial power. The Obama Administration and the newly elected Israeli prime minister share more than overlapping policy-makers and long-term commitments to military-driven empire building. They have made it clear that they will proceed in setting in motion a series of diplomatic and economic moves destined to prepare the stage for launching a genocidal war against Iran. This will be in line with Obama’s rhetoric of recreating a Jewish-Afro-American alliance, one based on Israeli interests and American lives! The only deterrent to new wars of extermination is mass action, which increases the political, economic and military costs for Israeli aggression. Only when Israeli casualties mount, when Zionist exploiters and bankers suffer losses, when its academics and tourist sites are boycotted, then and only then will the Israelis and their US acolytes begin to rethink their blind adherence to militarist policies. It is only then that they will rethink their irrational Judeo-centric vision of a world made by and for the one Chosen People living in the Only Moral State in the world.

Unfortunately it may take some military shocks to dispel these tribal fantasies. History teaches us that there is nothing like a bloody defeat to end the Superman Complex.

Appendix #1

51 Member Organizations of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations:

1. Ameinu

2. American Friends of Likud

3. American Gathering/Federation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors

4. American-Israel Friendship League

5. American Israel Public Affairs Committee

6. American Jewish Committee

7. American Jewish Congress

8. American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

9. American Sephardi Federation

10. American Zionist Movement

11. Americans for Peace Now

12. AMIT

13. Anti-Defamation League

14. Association of Reform Zionist of America

15. B’nai B’rith International

16. Bnai Zion

17. Central Committee of American Rabbis

18. Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America

19. Development Corporation for Israel/State of Israel Bonds

20. Emunah of America

21. Friends of Israel Defense Forces

22. Hadassah, Women’s Zionist Organization of America

23. Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society

24. Hillel: The Foundation of Jewish Campus Life

25. Jewish Community Centers Association

26. Jewish Council for Public Affairs

27. Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs

28. Jewish Labor Committee

29. Jewish National Fund

30. Jewish Reconstructionist Federation

31. Jewish War Veterans of the USA

32. Jewish Women International

33. MERCAZ USA, Zionist Organization of the Conservative Movement

34. NA’AMAT USA

35. NCSJ: Advocates on behalf of Jews in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States and Eurasia

36. National Council of Jewish Women

37. National Council of Young Israel

38. ORT America

39. Rabbinical Assembly

40. Rabbinical Council of America

41. Religious Zionist of America

42. Union for Reform Judaism

43. Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America

44. United Jewish Communities

45. United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism

46. WIZO

47. Women’s League for Conservative Judaism

48. Women of Reform Judaism

49. Workmen’s Circle

50. World Zionist Executive, US

51. Zionist Organization of America

Appendix #2 List of Israeli Officials involved in War Crimes during the Gaza Invasion.
This a partial and growing list of potential war criminals compiled by a group of Israeli activists, despite Israeli government censorship, and as a challenge to the Israeli Attorney General Menachem Mazuz and his military counterpart, Judge Advocate General Brigadier General Avihai Mandelblit:

1. Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minster

2. Ehud Barak, Israeli War Minister

3. Tzipi Livni, Foreign Minister of Israel

4. Yuval Diskin, Shin Bet security service chief

5. Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenazi, IOF Chief of Staff

6. Colonel Hartzi Halevi, Paratroops Brigade Commander

7. Commander of the 401st Brigade Colonel Yigal Slovik

8. Brig Gen Jonathan Locker, head of Israeli air forces

9. Maj. Gen. Ido Nehushtan, Israeli air forces

10. Colonel Ron Ashrov, Commander of the Northern Gaza

11. Brigadier-General Eyal Eisenberg - Commander of all the IOF

12. Colonel Yigal Slovik, commander of 401st Armored Corps Brigade convoy

13. Sho'alay Marom, Brigadier (res.)

14. Lt. Col. Yoav Mordechai, Golani infantry brigade's 13th Battalion in Gaza

15. Lt. Col. Oren Cohen, Battalion 13 in the Golani Brigade

16. Lt. Col. Avi Blot 101st Battalion Paratrooper Brigade

17. Lieutenant-Colonel Yehuda Cohen, Givati infantry Brigade's Rotem Regiment

18. Lieutenant-Colonel Ronen Dagmi, deputy commander of the 401st Armored Brigade

19. Col. Avi Peled, commander brigade in Battalion 51

20. Brig.-Gen.( res.) Zvika Fogel former deputy OC Southern Command

21. Brigadier-General Yuval Halamish, Chief IOF Intelligence Officer

22. Paratrooper Brigade commander, Hartzi Halevi

23. Col. Hertzi Halevy, brigade commander

24. Col. Tomer Tsiter, participated in the massacre in Gaza during "Operation Cast Lead", and previously he participated in the massacre
"Operation Defensive Shield" in the Jeninrefugee camp in 2002.

25. Gur Rosenblatt, infantry reserve officer

26. Guy Ohaion, infantry reserve officer

27. Lt. Col. Erez

28. Maj. Nimrod Aloni

29. Lieutenant Colonel (res.) Shlomo Saban

30. Capt. Ron Vardi ,

31. Col. Pnina Sharvit-Baruch, head of the International Law Department, Military Advocate General's Office,

32. Major-General Yoav Galant, southern command chief

33. Richard Awizrat, Senior Warrant Officer,

34. Major General Amos Yadlin, Military Intelligence chief

Note: James Petras’ latest book, Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of US Power (2008, Clarity Press, Inc.) is available through Amazon.com.

James Petras is a retired Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, SUNY, New York, U.S., and adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada who has published prolifically on Latin American and Middle Eastern political issues.

Zionism And Its Impact
By Ann M. Lesch
http://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Palestine-Remembered/Story452.html
Posted at Palestine Remembered on August 13, 2001

The Zionist movement has maintained a striking continuity in its aims and methods over the past century. From the start, the movement sought to achieve a Jewish majority in Palestine and to establish a Jewish state on as much of the LAND as possible. The methods included promoting both mass Jewish immigration and acquiring tracts of land that would become the inalienable property of the Jewish people. This policy inevitably prevented the indigenous Arab residents from attaining their national goals and establishing a Palestinian state. It also necessitated displacing Palestinians from their lands and jobs when their presence conflicted with Zionist interests.

The Zionist movement-and subsequently the state of ISRAEL-failed to develop a positive approach to the Palestinian presence and Palestinian aspirations. Although many Israelis recognized the moral dilemma posed by the Palestinians, the majority either tried to ignore the issue or to resolve it by force majeure. Thus, the Palestine problem festered and grew, instead of being resolved.

Historical Background

The Zionist movement arose in late nineteenth-century Europe, influenced by the nationalist ferment sweeping that continent. Zionism acquired its particular focus from the ancient Jewish longing for the return to Zion and received a strong impetus from the increasingly intolerable conditions facing the large Jewish community in Tsarist Russia. The movement also developed at the time of major European territorial acquisitions in Asia and Africa, and benefited from the European powers' competition for influence in the shrinking Ottoman Empire.

One result of this involvement with European expansionism, however, was that the leaders of the nascent nationalist movements in the Middle East viewed Zionism as an adjunct of European colonialism. Moreover, Zionist assertions of the contemporary relevance of the Jews' historical ties to Palestine, coupled with their land purchases and immigration, alarmed the indigenous population of the Ottoman districts that comprised Palestine. The Jewish community (yishuv) rose from 6 percent of Palestine's population in 1880 to 10 percent by 1914. Although the numbers were insignificant, the settlers were outspoken enough to arouse the opposition of Arab leaders and induce them to exert counter pressure on the Ottoman regime to prohibit Jewish immigration and land buying.

As early as 1891, a group of Muslim and Christian notables cabled Istanbul, urging the government to prohibit Jewish immigration and land purchase. The resulting edicts radically curtailed land purchases in the Sanjak (district) of JERUSALEM for the next decade. When a Zionist Congress resolution in 1905 called for increased colonization, the Ottoman regime suspended all land transfers to Jews in both the Sanjak of Jerusalem and the Wilayat (province) of Beirut.
After the coup d'etat by the Young Turks in 1908, the Palestinians used their representation in the central parliament and their access to newly opened local newspapers to press their claims and express their concerns. They were particularly vociferous in opposition to discussions that took place between the financially hard-pressed Ottoman regime and Zionist leaders in 1912-13, which would have let the world Zionist Organization purchase crown land (Jiftlik) in the Baysan Valley, along the Jordan River.

The Zionists did not try to quell Palestinian fears, since their concern was to encourage colonization from Europe and to minimize the obstacles in their path. The only effort to meet to discuss Palestinian and Zionist aspirations occurred in the spring of 1914. Its difficulties illustrated the incompatibility in the aims of both sides aspirations. The Palestinians wanted the Zionists to present them with a document that would state

* Zionists precise political ambitions,
* Zionists willingness to open their schools to Palestinians, and
* Zionists intentions of learning Arabic and integrating with the local population.

The Zionists rejected this proposal.

The British Mandate

The proclamation of the BALFOUR DECLARATION on November 2, 1917, and the arrival of British troops in Palestine soon after, transformed the political situation. The declaration gave the Zionist movement its long-sought legal status. The qualification that: nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine seemed a relatively insignificant obstacle to the Zionists, especially since it referred only to those communities': civil and religious rights, not to political or national rights. The subsequent British occupation gave Britain the ability to carry out that pledge and provide the protection necessary for the Zionists to realize their aims.

In fact, the British had made three mutually contradictory promises for the future of Palestine. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 with the French and Russian governments proposed that Palestine be placed under international administration. The HUSAYN-MCMAHON CORRESPONDENCE, 1915-1916, on the basis of which the Arab revolt was launched, implied that Palestine would be included in the zone of Arab independence. In contrast, the Balfour Declaration encouraged the colonization of Palestine by Jews, under British protection. British officials recognized the irreconcilability of these pledges but hoped that a modus vivendi could be achieved, both between the competing imperial powers, "France and Britain", and between the Palestinians and the Jews. Instead, these contradictions set the stage for three decades of conflict-ridden British rule in Palestine.

Initially, many British politicians shared the Zionists' assumption that gradual, regulated Jewish immigration and settlement would lead to a Jewish majority in Palestine, whereupon it would become independent, with legal protection for the Arab minority .The assumption that this could be accomplished without serious resistance was shattered at the outset of British rule. Britain thereafter was caught in an increasingly untenable position, unable to persuade either Palestinians or Zionists to alter their demands and forced to station substantial military forces in Palestine to maintain security.

The Palestinians had assumed that they would gain some form of independence when Ottoman rule disintegrated, whether through a separate state or integration with neighboring Arab lands. These hopes were bolstered by the Arab revolt, the entry of Faysal Ibn Husayn into Damascus in 1918, and the proclamation of Syrian independence in 1920. Their hopes were dashed, however, when Britain imposed direct colonial rule and elevated the yishuv to a special status. Moreover, the French ousted Faysal from Damascus in July 1920, and British compensation-in the form of thrones in Transjordan and Iraq for Abdullah and Faysal, respectively-had no positive impact on the Arabs in Palestine. In fact, the action underlined the different treatment accorded Palestine and its disadvantageous political situation. These concerns were exacerbated by Jewish immigration: the yishuv comprised 28 percent of the population by 1936 and reached 32 percent by 1947 (click here to view map of Palestinian vs. Jewish population distribution as of 1946). The British umbrella was critically important to the growth and consolidation of the yishuv, enabling it to root itself firmly despite Palestinian opposition. Although British support diminished in the late 1930s, the yishuv was strong enough by then to withstand the Palestinians on its own. After World War II, the Zionist movement also was able to turn to the emerging superpower, the UNITED STATES, for diplomatic support and legitimization.

The Palestinians' responses to Jewish immigration, land purchases, and political demands were remarkably consistent. They insisted that Palestine remain an Arab country, with the same right of self-determination and independence as Egypt, Transjordan, and Iraq. Britain granted those countries independence without a violent struggle since their claims to self-determination were not contested by European settlers. The Palestinians argued that Palestinian territory could not and should not be used to solve the plight of the Jews in Europe, and that Jewish national aspirations should not override their own rights.

Palestinian opposition peaked in the late 1930s: the six-month general strike in 1936 was followed the next year by a widespread rural revolt. This rebellion welled up from the bottom of Palestinian society-unemployed urban workers, displaced peasants crowded into towns, and debt-ridden villagers. It was supported by most merchants and professionals in the towns, who feared competition from the yishuv. Members of the elite families acted as spokesmen before the British administration through the ARAB HIGHER COMMITTEE, which was formed during the 1936 strike. However, the British banned the committee in October 1937 and arrested its members, on the eve of the revolt.

Only one of the Palestinian political parties was willing to limit its aims and accept the principle of territorial partition: The NATIONAL DEFENSE PARTY, led by RAGHIB AL-NASHASHIBI (mayor of Jerusalem from 1920 to 1934), was willing to accept partition in 1937 so long as the Palestinians obtained sufficient land and could merge with Transjordan to form a larger political entity. However, the British PEEL COMMISSION's plan, announced in July 1937, would have forced the Palestinians to leave the olive- and grain- growing areas of Galilee, the orange groves on the Mediterranean coast, and the urban port cities of HAIFA and ACRE. That was too great a loss for even the National Defense Party to accept, and so it joined in the general denunciations of partition.

During the PALESTINE MANDATE period the Palestinian community was 70 percent rural, 75 to 80 percent illiterate, and divided internally between town and countryside and between elite families and villagers. Despite broad support for the national aims, the Palestinians could not achieve the unity and strength necessary to withstand the combined pressure of the British forces and the Zionist movement. In fact, the political structure was decapitated in the late 1930s when the British banned the Arab Higher Committee and arrested hundreds of local politicians. When efforts were made in the 1940s to rebuild the political structure, the impetus came largely from outside, from Arab rulers who were disturbed by the deteriorating conditions in Palestine and feared their repercussions on their own newly acquired independence.

The Arab rulers gave priority to their own national considerations and provided limited diplomatic and military support to the Palestinians. The Palestinian Arabs continued to demand a state that would reflect the Arab majority's weight-diminished to 68 percent by 1947. They rejected the UNITED NATIONS (U.N.) partition plan of November 1947 [click here for a map illustration], which granted the Jews statehood in 55 percent of Palestine, an area that included as many Arab residents as Jews. However, the Palestinian Arabs lacked the political strength and military force to back up their claim. Once Britain withdrew its forces in 1948 and the Jews proclaimed the state of Israel, the Arab rulers used their armed forces to protect those zones that the partition plans had ALLOCATED to the Arab state [click here for a map illustration]. By the time armistice agreements were signed in 1949, the Arab areas had shrunk to only 23 percent of Palestine. The Egyptian army held the GAZA STRIP, and Transjordanian forces dominated the hills of central Palestine. At least 726,000 of the 1.3 million Palestinian Arabs fled from the area held by Israel. Emir Abdullah subsequently annexed the zone that his army occupied, renaming it the WEST BANK.

The Zionist Movement

The dispossession and expulsion of a majority of Palestinians were the result of Zionist policies planned over a thirty-year period. fundamentally, Zionism focused on two needs:

1. to attain a Jewish majority in Palestine
2. to acquire statehood

irrespective of the wishes of the indigenous population. Non-recognition of the political and national rights of the Palestinian people was a KEY Zionist policy.

Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, placed maximalist demands before the Paris Peace Conference in February 1919. He stated that he expected 70,000 to 80,000 Jewish immigrants to arrive each year in Palestine. When they became the majority, they would form an independent government and Palestine and would become: "as Jewish as England is English". Weizmann proposed that the boundaries should be the Mediterranean Sea on the west; Sidon, the Litani River, and Mount Hermon on the north; all of Transjordan west of the Hijaz railway on the east; and a line across Sinai from Aqaba to al-Arish on the south. He argued that:

"the boundaries above outlined are what we consider essential for the economic foundation of the country. Palestine must have its natural outlet to the sea and control of its rivers and their headwaters. The boundaries are sketched with the general economic needs and historic traditions of the country in mind."

Weizmann offered the Arab countries a free zone in Haifa and a joint port at Aqaba.

Weizmann's policy was basically in accord with that of the leaders of the yishuv, who held a conference in December 1918 in which they formulated their own demands for the peace conference. The yishuv plan stressed that they must control appointments to the administrative services and that the British must actively assist their program to transform Palestine into a democratic Jewish state in which the Arabs would have minority rights. Although the peace conference did not explicitly allocate such extensive territories to the Jewish national home and did not support the goal of transforming all of Palestine into a Jewish state, it opened the door to such a possibility. More important, Weizmann's presentation stated clearly and forcefully the long-term aims of the movement.

These aims were based on certain fundamental tenets of Zionism:

1. The movement was seen not only as inherently righteous, but also as meeting an overwhelming need among European Jews.
2. European culture was superior to indigenous Arab culture; the Zionists could help civilize the East.
3. External support was needed from a major power; relations with the Arab world were a secondary matter.
4. Arab nationalism was a legitimate political movement, but Palestinian nationalism was either illegitimate or nonexistent.
5. Finally, if the Palestinians would not reconcile themselves to Zionism, force majeure, not compromise, was the only feasible response.

First

Adherents of Zionism believed that the Jewish people had an inherent and inalienable right to Palestine. Religious Zionists stated this in biblical terms, referring to the divine promise of the land to the tribes of Israel. Secular Zionists relied more on the argument that Palestine alone could solve the problem of Jewish dispersion and virulent anti-Semitism. Weizmann stated in 1930 that the needs of 16 million Jews had to be balanced against those of 1 million Palestinian Arabs:
"The Balfour Declaration and the Mandate have definitely lifted [Palestine] out of the context of the Middle East and linked it up with the world-wide Jewish problem. ...The rights which the Jewish people has been adjudged in Palestine do not depend on the consent, and cannot be subjected to the will, of the majority of its present inhabitants."
This perspective took its most extreme form with the Revisionist movement. Its founder, Vladimir Jabotinsky, was so self-righteous about the Zionist cause that he justified any actions taken against the Arabs in order to realize Zionist goals.

Second

Zionists generally felt that European civilization was superior to Arab culture and values. Theodor Herzl, the founder of the World Zionist Organization, wrote in the Jewish State (1886) that the Jewish community could serve as:
"part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism."

Weizmann also believed that he was engaged in a fight of civilization against the desert. The Zionists would bring enlightenment and economic development to the backward Arabs. Similarly, David Ben-Gurion, the leading labor Zionist, could not understand why Arabs rejected his offer to use Jewish finance, scientific knowledge, and technical expertise to modernize the Middle East. He attributed this rejection to backwardness rather than to the affront that Zionism posed to the Arabs' pride and to their aspirations for independence.

Third

Zionist leaders recognized that they needed an external patron to legitimize their presence in the international arena and to provide them legal and military protection in Palestine. Great Britain played that role in the 1920s and 1930s, and the United States became the mentor in the mid-1940s. Zionist leaders realized that they needed to make tactical accommodations to that patron-such as downplaying their public statements about their political aspirations or accepting a state on a limited territory-while continuing to work toward their long-term goals. The presence and needs of the Arabs were viewed as secondary. The Zionist leadership never considered allying with the Arab world against the British and Americans. Rather, Weizmann, in particular, felt that the yishuv should bolster the British Empire and guard its strategic interests in the region. Later, the leaders of Israel perceived the Jewish state as a strategic asset to the United States in the Middle East.

Fourth

Zionist politicians accepted the idea of an Arab nation but rejected the concept of a Palestinian nation. They considered the Arab residents of Palestine as comprising a minute fraction of the land and people of the Arab world, and as lacking any separate identity and aspirations (click here, to read our response to this myth). Weizmann and Ben-Gurion were willing to negotiate with Arab rulers in order to gain those rulers' recognition of Jewish statehood in Palestine in return for the Zionists' recognition of Arab independence elsewhere, but they would not negotiate with the Arab politicians in Palestine for a political settlement in their common homeland. As early as 1918, Weizmann wrote to a prominent British politician:
"The real Arab movement is developing in Damascus and Mecca. ..the so-called Arab question in Palestine would therefore assume only a purely local character, and in fact is not considered a serious factor."

In line with that thinking, Weizmann met with Emir Faysal in the same year, in an attempt to win his agreement to Jewish statehood in Palestine in return for Jewish financial support for Faysal as ruler of Syria and Arabia.

Ben-Gurion, Weizmann, and other Zionist leaders met with prominent Arab officials during the 1939 LONDON CONFERENCE, which was convened by Britain to seek a compromise settlement in Palestine. The Arab diplomats from Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia criticized the exceptional position that the Balfour Declaration had granted the Jewish community and emphasized the estrangement between the Arab and Jewish residents that large scale Jewish immigration had caused. In response, Weizmann insisted that Palestine remain open to all Jews who wanted to immigrate, and Ben-Gurion suggested that all of Palestine should become a Jewish state, federated with the surrounding Arab states. The Arab participants criticized these demands for exacerbating the conflict, rather than contributing to the search for peace. The Zionists' premise that Arab statehood could be recognized while ignoring the Palestinians was thus rejected by the Arab rulers themselves.

Fifth

Finally, Zionist leaders argued that if the Palestinians could not reconcile themselves to Zionism, then force majeure, not a compromise of goals, was the only possible response. By the early 1920s, after violent Arab protests broke out in Jaffa and Jerusalem, leaders of the yishuv recognized that it might be impossible to bridge the gap between the aims of the two peoples. Building the national home would lead to an unavoidable clash, since the Arab majority would not agree to become a minority. In fact, as early as 1919 Ben-Gurion stated bluntly:

"Everybody sees a difficulty in the question of relations between Arabs and Jews. But not everybody sees that there is no solution to this question. No solution! There is a gulf, and nothing can fill this gulf. ...I do not know what Arab will agree that Palestine should belong to the Jews. ...We, as a nation, want this country to be ours; the Arabs, as a nation, want this country to be theirs."

As tensions increased in the 1920s and the 1930s Zionist leaders realized that they had to coerce the Palestinian acquiesce in a diminished status. Ben-Gurion stated in 1937, during the Arab revolt:

"This is a national war declared upon us by the Arabs. ... This is an active resistance by the Palestinians to what they regard as a usurpation of their homeland by the Jews. ...But the fighting is only one aspect of the conflict, which is in its essence a political one. And politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves."

This sober conclusion did not lead Ben-Gurion to negotiate with the Palestinian Arabs: instead he became more determined to strengthen the Jewish military forces so that they could compel the Arabs to relinquish their claims.

Practical Zionism

In order to realize the aims of Zionism and build the Jewish national home, the Zionist movement undertook the following practical steps. They:

1. Built political structures that could assume state functions
2. Created a military force.
3. Promoted large-scale immigration.
4. Acquired land as the inalienable property of the Jewish people
5. Established monopolistic concessions. The labor federation, Histadrut, tried to force Jewish enterprises to hire only Jewish labor
6. Setting up an autonomous Hebrew-language educational system.

These measures created a self-contained national entity on Palestinian soil that was ENTIRELY SEPARATE from the Arab community.

The yishuv established an elected community council, executive body, administrative departments, and religious courts soon after the British assumed control over Palestine. When the PALESTINE MANDATE was ratified by the League of Nations in 1922, the World Zionist Organization gained the responsibility to advise and cooperate with the British administration not only on economic and social matters affecting the Jewish national home but also on issues involving the general development of the country. Although the British rejected pressure to give the World Zionist Organization an equal share in administration and control over immigration and land transfers, the yishuv did gain a privileged advisory position.

The Zionists were strongly critical of British efforts to establish a LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL in 1923, 1930, and 1936. They realized that Palestinians' demands for a legislature with a Palestinian majority ran counter to their own need to delay establishing representative bodies until the Jewish community was much larger. In 1923, the Jewish residents did participate in the elections for a Legislative Council, but they were relieved that the Palestinians' boycott compelled the British to cancel the results. In 1930 and 1936 the World Zionist Organization vigorously opposed British proposals for a legislature, fearing that, if the Palestinians received the majority status that proportional representation would require, then they would try to block Jewish immigration and the purchase of land by Zionist companies. Zionist opposition was couched indirectly in the assertion that Palestine was not ripe for self-rule, a code for not until there's a Jewish majority.
To bolster this position, the yishuv formed defense forces (Haganah) in March 1920. They were preceded by the establishment of guards (hashomer) in Jewish rural settlements in the 1900s and the formation of a Jewish Legion in World War I. However, the British disbanded the Jewish Legion and allowed only sealed armories in the settlements and mixed Jewish-British area defense committees.

Despite its illegal status, the Haganah expanded to number 10,000 trained and mobilized men, and 40,000 reservists by 1936. During the 1937-38 Arab revolt, the Haganah engaged in active defense against Arab insurgents and cooperated with the British to guard railway lines, the oil pipeline to Haifa, and border fences. This cooperation deepened during World War II, when 18,800 Jewish volunteers joined the British forces. Haganah's special Palmach units served as scouts and sappers for the British army in Lebanon in 1941-42. This wartime experience helped to transform the Haganah into a regular fighting force. When Ben-Gurion became the World Zionist Organization's secretary of defense in June 1947, he accelerated mobilization as well as arms buying in the United States and Europe. As a result, mobilization leaped to 30,000 by May 1948, when statehood was proclaimed, and then doubled to 60,000 by mid-July-twice the number serving in the Arab forces arrayed against Israel.

A principal means for building up the national home was the promotion of large-scale immigration from Europe. Estimates of the Palestinian population demonstrate the dramatic impact of immigration. The first British census (December 31, 1922) counted 757,182 residents, of whom 83,794 were Jewish. The second census (December 31, 1931) enumerated 1,035,821, including 174,006 Jews. Thus, the absolute number of Jews had doubled and the relative number had increased from 11 percent to 17 percent. Two-thirds of this growth could be attributed to net immigration, and one third to natural increase. Two-thirds of the yishuv was concentrated in Jerusalem and Jaffa and Tel Aviv, with most of the remainder in the north, including the towns of HAIFA, SAFAD, and Tiberias.

The Mandate specified that the rate of immigration should accord with the economic capacity of the country to absorb the immigrants. In 1931, the British government reinterpreted this to take into account only the Jewish sector of the economy, excluding the Palestinian sector, which was suffering from heavy unemployment. As a result, the pace of immigration accelerated in 1932 and peaked in 1935-36. In other words, the absolute number of Jewish residents doubled in the five years from 1931 to 1936 to 370,000, so that they constituted 28 percent of the total population. Not until 1939 did the British impose a severe quota on Jewish immigrants. That restriction was resisted by the yishuv with a sense of desperation, since it blocked access to a key haven for the Jews whom Hitler was persecuting and exterminating in Germany and the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe. Net immigration was limited during the war years in the 1940s, but the government estimated in 1946 that there were about 583,000 Jews of nearly 1,888,000 residents, or 31 percent of the total Seventy percent of them were urban, and they continued to be overwhelmingly concentrated in Jerusalem (100,000) the Haifa area (119,000), and the JAFFA and RAMLA districts (327,000) (click here for a map illustrating Palestine's population distribution in 1946) . The remaining 43,000 were largely in Galilee, with a scattering in the Negev and almost none in the central highlands.

The World Zionist Organization's purchasing agencies launched large-scale land purchases in order to found rural settlements and stake territorial claims. In 1920 the Zionists held about 650,000 dunums (one dunum equals approximately one-quarter of an acre). By 1930, the amount had expanded to 1,164,000 dunums and by 1936 to 1,400,000 dunums. The major purchasing agent (the Palestine Land Development Company) estimated that, by 1936, 89 percent had been bought from large landowners (primarily absentee owners from Beirut) and only 11 percent from peasants. By 1947, the yishuv held 1.9 million dunums. Nevertheless, this represented only 7 percent of the total land surface or 10 to 12 percent of the cultivable land (click here for a map illustrating Palestine's landownership distribution in 1946).

According to Article 3 of the Constitution of the Jewish Agency, the land was held by the Jewish National Fund as the inalienable property of the Jewish people; ONLY Jewish labor could be employed in the settlements, Palestinians protested bitterly against this inalienability clause. The moderate National Defense Party , for example, petitioned the British in 1935 to prevent further land sales, arguing that it was a: life and death for the Arabs, in that it resulted in the transfer of their country to other hands and the loss of their nationality.

The placement of Jewish settlements was often based on political considerations. The Palestine Land Development Company had four criteria for land purchase:

1. The economic suitability of the tract
2. Its contribution to forming a solid block of Jewish territory.
3. The prevention of isolation of settlements
4. The impact of the purchase on the political-territorial claims of the Zionists.

The stockade and watchtower settlements constructed in 1937, for example, were designed to secure control over key parts of Galilee for the yishuv in case the British implemented the PEEL PARTITION PLAN. Similarly, eleven settlements were hastily erected in the Negev in late 1946 in an attempt to stake a political claim in that entirely Palestinian-populated territory.

In addition to making these land purchases, prominent Jewish businessmen won monopolistic concessions from the British government that gave the Zionist movement an important role in the development of Palestine's natural resources. In 1921, Pinhas Rutenberg's Palestine Electric Company acquired the right to electrify all of Palestine except Jerusalem. Moshe Novomeysky received the concession to develop the minerals in the Dead Sea in 1927. And the Palestine Land Development Company gained the concession to drain the Hula marshes, north of the Sea of Galilee, in 1934. In each case, the concession was contested by other serious non-Jewish claimants; Palestinian politicians argued that the government should retain control itself in order to develop the resources for the benefit of the entire country.

The inalienability clause in the Jewish National Fund contracts included provision that ONLY JEWS could work on Jewish agricultural settlements. The concepts of manual labor and the return to the soil were key to the Zionist enterprise. This Jewish labor policy was enforced by the General Foundation of Jewish Labor (Histadrut), founded in 1920 and headed by David Ben-Gurion. Since some Jewish builders and citrus growers hired Arabs, who worked for lower wages than Jews, the Histadrut launched a campaign in 1933 to remove those Arab workers. Histadrut organizers picketed citrus groves and evicted Arab workers from construction sites and factories in the cities. The strident propaganda by the Histradut increased the Arabs' fears for the future. George Mansur, a Palestinian labor leader, wrote angrily in 1937:

"The Histadrut's fundamental aim is 'the conquest of labor' ...No matter how many Arab workers are unemployed, they have no right to take any job which a possible immigrant might occupy. No Arab has the right to work in Jewish undertakings."

Finally, the establishment of an all-Jewish, Hebrew-language educational system was an essential component of building the Jewish national home. It helped to create a cohesive national ethos and a lingua franca among the diverse immigrants. However, it also entirely separated Jewish children from Palestinian children, who attended the governmental schools. The policy widened the linguistic and cultural gap between the two peoples. In addition, there was a stark contrast in their literacy levels. In 1931:

* 93 percent of Jewish males (above age seven) were literate
* 71 percent of Christian males were literate
* Only 25 percent of Muslim males were literate.

Overall, Palestinian literacy increased from 19 percent in 1931 to 27 percent by 1940, but only 30 percent of Palestinian children could be accommodated in government and private schools.

The practical policies of the Zionist movement created a compact and well-rooted community by the late 1940s. The yishuv had its own political, educational, economic, and military institutions, parallel to the governmental system. Jews minimized their contact with the Arab community and outnumbered the Arabs in certain key respects. Jewish urban dwellers, for example, greatly exceeded Arab urbanites, even though Jews constituted but one-third of the population. Many more Jewish children attended school than did Arab children, and Jewish firms employed seven times as many workers as Arab firms.

Thus the relative weight and autonomy of the yishuv were much greater than sheer numbers would suggest. The transition to statehood was facilitated by the existence of the proto state institutions and a mobilized, literate public. But separation from the Palestinian residents was exacerbated by these autarchic policies.

Policies Toward the Palestinians

The main viewpoint within the Zionist movement was that the Arab problem would be solved by first solving the Jewish problem. In time, the Palestinians would be presented with the fait accompli of a Jewish majority. Settlements, land purchases, industries, and military forces were developed gradually and systematically so that the yishuv would become too strong to uproot. In a letter to his son, Weizmann compared the Arabs to the rocks of Judea, obstacles that had to be cleared to make the path smooth. When the Palestinians mounted violent protests in 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936-39, and the late 1940s, the yishuv sought to curb them by force, rather than seek a political accommodation with the indigenous people. Any concessions made to the Palestinians by the British government concerning immigration, land sales, or labor were strongly contested by the Zionist leaders. In fact, in 1936, Ben-Gurion stated that the Palestinians will only acquiesce in a Jewish Eretz Israel after they are in a state of total despair.

Zionists viewed their acceptance of territorial partition as a temporary measure; they did not give up the idea of the Jewish community's right to all of Palestine. Weizmann commented in 1937:

"In the course of time we shall expand to the whole country ...this is only an arrangement for the next 15-30 years."

Ben-Gurion stated in 1938,

"After we become a strong force, as a result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine."

A FEW EFFORTS were made to reduce Arab opposition. For example in the 1920s, Zionist organizations provided financial support to Palestinian political parties, newspapers, and individuals. This was most evident in the establishment and support of the National Muslim Societies (1921-23) and Agricultural Parties (1924-26). These parties were expected to be neutral or positive toward the Zionist movement, in return for which they would receive financial subventions and their members would be helped to obtain jobs and loans. This policy was backed by Weizmann, who commented that:

"extremists and moderates alike were susceptible to the influence of money and honors."
However, Leonard Stein, a member of the London office of the World Zionist Organization, denounced this practice. He argued that Zionists must seek a permanent modus vivendi with the Palestinians by hiring them in Jewish firms and admitting them to Jewish universities. He maintained that political parties in which Arab moderates are merely Arab gramophones playing Zionist records would collapse as soon as the Zionist financial support ended. In any event, the World Zionist Organization terminated the policy by 1927, as it was in the midst of a financial crisis and as most of the leaders felt that the policy was ineffective.

Some Zionist leaders argued that the Arab community had to be involved in the practical efforts of the Zionist movement. Chaim Kalvarisky, who initiated the policy of buying support, articulated in 1923 the gap between that ideal and the reality:

"Some people say. ..that only by common work in the field of commerce, industry and agriculture mutual understanding between Jews and Arabs will ultimately be attained. ...This is, however, merely a theory. In practice we have not done and we are doing nothing for any work in common.

* How many Arab officials have we installed in our banks? Not even one.
* How many Arabs have we brought into our schools? Not even one.
* What commercial houses have we established in company with Arabs? Not even one."

Two years later, Kalvarisky lamented:

"We all admit the importance of drawing closer to the Arabs, but in fact we are growing more distant like a drawn bow. We have no contact: two separate worlds, each living its own life and fighting the other."

Some members of the yishuv emphasized the need for political relations with the Palestinian Arabs, to achieve either a peacefully negotiated territorial partition (as Nahum Goldmann sought) or a binational state (as Brit Shalom and Hashomer Ha-tzair proposed). But few went as far as Dr. Judah L. Magnes, chancellor of The Hebrew University, who argued that Zionism meant merely the creation of a Jewish cultural center in Palestine rather than an independent state. In any case, the binationalists had little impact politically and were strongly opposed by the leadership of the Zionist movement.

Zionist leaders felt they did not harm the Palestinians by blocking them from working in Jewish settlements and industries or even by undermining their majority status. The Palestinians were considered a small part of the large Arab nation; their economic and political needs could be met in that wider context, Zionists felt, rather than in Palestine. They could move elsewhere if they sought land and could merge with Transjordan if they sought political independence.

This thinking led logically to the concept of population transfer. In 1930 Weizmann suggested that the problems of insufficient land resources within Palestine and of the dispossession of peasants could be solved by moving them to Transjordan and Iraq. He urged the Jewish Agency to provide a loan of £1 million to help move Palestinian farmers to Transjordan. The issue was discussed at length in the Jewish Agency debates of 1936-37 on partition. At first, the majority proposed a voluntary transfer of Palestinians from the Jewish state, but later they realized that the Palestinians would never leave voluntarily. Therefore, key leaders such as Ben-Gurion insisted that compulsory transfer was essential. The Jewish Agency then voted that the British government should pay for the removal of the Palestinian Arabs from the territory allotted to the Jewish state.

The fighting from 1947 to 1949 resulted in a far larger transfer than had been envisioned in 1937. It solved the Arab problem by removing most of the Arabs and was the ultimate expression of the policy of force majeure.

Conclusion

The land and people of Palestine were transformed during the thirty years of British rule. The systematic colonization undertaken by the Zionist movement enabled the Jewish community to establish separate and virtually autonomous political, economic, social, cultural, and military institutions. A state within a state was in place by the time the movement launched its drive for independence. The legal underpinnings for the autonomous Jewish community were provided by the British Mandate. The establishment of a Jewish state was first proposed by the British Royal Commission in July 1937 and then endorsed by the UNITED NATIONS in November 1947.

That drive for statehood IGNORED the presence of a Palestinian majority with its own national aspirations. The right to create a Jewish state-and the overwhelming need for such a state-were perceived as overriding Palestinian counterclaims. Few members of the yishuv supported the idea of binationalism. Rather, territorial partition was seen by most Zionist leaders as the way to gain statehood while according certain national rights to the Palestinians. TRANSFER of Palestinians to neighboring Arab states was also envisaged as a means to ensure the formation of a homogeneous Jewish territory. The implementation of those approaches led to the formation of independent Israel, at the cost of dismembering the Palestinian community and fostering long-term hostility with the Arab world.

Ann M. Lesch
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Related Links

* Zionist Quotes: "Transfer" (Ethnic Cleansing)
* Zionist Quotes: A Jewish Majority By All Means
* The Birth Of the Palestinian Refugee Problem By the Israeli historian Benny Morris
* Expulsion of the Palestinians, re-examined By French Newspaper Le Monde

The Above article was quoted from Encyclopedia Of The Palestinians
edited by Philip Mattar

Ann M. Lesch is Professor of Political Science and Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at The American University in Cairo.