Israel Channel 2 program on Anti-Semitism (must watch)

Wednesday, April 10, 2013 at 6:52PM Gilad Atzmon

 

Israel defines itself as the Jewish State, its tanks are decorated with Jewish symbols, it commits crimes against humanity in the name of the Jewish people, and yet, Israeli TV can’t understand why people out there express some anger towards Israel. Zionism or Jews. I can’t make up my mind whether this is tragic or just sad -time is overdue for Israel and Jews to self-reflect.
The TV program fails to define what ‘anti Semitism’ is. It also fails to suggest since when Jews are Semites.

In spite of being an Israeli (Hebrew) TV program, many of the segments are in English.

Interestingly enough, just a year ago, Ethnic Cleanser enthusiast Alan Dershowitz crowned me as the ‘biggest danger to the Jewish people.’ This time I am not mentioned at all. I guess that our Zionist, AZZ and their Palestinian Sabbath Goyim grasped by now that the Anti Semite/Racist label is not going to work with me. I easily survived the smear. They will soon try something new. I can see them working hard.

  

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

Earth Day / Palestine

Daniel Mabsout,

Today is the 37th commemoration of earth day that started in year 1976 and has been celebrated every year since. Originally the uprising started after the Israeli government – headed then by Rabin with Peres as a minister of defense- decided to confiscate 21000 hectares of Arab Land from Galilee to build Jewish settlements on them.

… The Protests started in Historic Palestine and spread to the West Bank , Jerusalem , Gaza where people rallied in support of each other . Also joined Palestinians from refugee camps in Arab countries, and Palestinians scattered everywhere in the world .The Israeli army imposed carefew and attacked the people destroying the shops and the homes. Six Palestinians fell martyrs during this uprising . Thus, the Palestinian Earth Day is commemorated each year on the 30th of March .
This year, this unity and this standing together will be missed among Palestinians and what we witness nowadays is something totally different . Gaza , the PA and the other multiple organizations and the refugees in Arab countries and those exiled in foreign countries have lost their capacity to come together and Israel succeeded in keeping them apart and has been working on this issue of setting them against each other .

According to Palestinian writer Tayseer al Khatib – who was interviewed on Nour radio station for the occasion – Palestinians need to go over their history and evaluate what has happened to them and what has happened to the cause and give an assessment of the whole situation in order to be able to proceed further . This assessment should cover the whole situation up to the present moment . If this assessment is not done and if the causes of the failure of the Cause are not defined and diagnosed it will be impossible to get anywhere . .Because of this, Tayseer al Khatib invited the leadership – mainly the Palestinian Authority – to speak openly to people , to Palestinians , about what has been done and why have we failed and where and what to do in order to go around these failures .
It is up to Palestinians – said Tayseer al Khatib – to decide what is the next step to get out of this dead end . Other wise the whole Palestinian endeavor will remain divided and the Popular Resistance that is being carried on by Palestinians in the West Bank will remain confined to certain areas and localities and will not be able to spread .

One short look at the policy of annexation carried on by the Zionists on this Earth Day is enough in order to see the extend of the damage . Israel will resume building settlements and 300 units are expected to be built South of Jerusalem , while 900 units are expected to be built in West Jerusalem, not to speak of the !500 units decided for the West Bank in the area called E1. Israel has already destroyed 60 houses owned by Arabs in Jerusalem, and 20000 other houses are expected to be leveled down which will leave 60000 Palestinians homeless .

Israelis have already withdrawn 10 thousands Jerusalem identities from people and one hundred thousands Palestinians living in Jerusalem had been isolated from the Holy City. And while Arabs are busy arranging and rallying for the so called Syrian Revolution and conspiring against Assad ,and while Palestinians are coordinating with Israeli affiliated NGOs and carrying on dubious functions unrelated to them and to their cause, and while HAMAS has fallen in the sectarian pit arranged for her by Israel and while the Palestinian Authority has reached an unimaginable level of corruption, Zionists continue successfully -undisturbed -their mission of confiscating the land and dispossessing the .people
River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

Burning out Another Room in the Arab House

  

      Mar 27 2013 / 9:12 pm

By Jeremy Salt – Ankara

In the ugly panorama that is the contemporary Middle East a light hardly flickers on the horizon. Iraq has been destroyed as a unitary Arab state and jihadis unleashed in Syria are burning out another room in the Arab house. Lebanon has again been brought to the brink of implosion through the intrigues of outside governments and local proxies incapable of putting the interests of their country ahead of their sectarian and power intrigues. The Palestinians are divided between those who live under the authority of one man who has bound himself to Israel and the US and two others who have bound themselves to Egypt and Qatar.

Fitna – the spreading of division and sowing of hatred amongst Muslims – is being fanned across the region by governments brazen enough to call themselves Muslim. Whether in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Iran, Shiism is the enemy. Ceaselessly stirring this pot from the outside are governments that feast on division in the Arab world.

There are those who loathe Bashar so much that they are willing to commit or tolerate any crime in the name of getting rid of him, including the deliberate bombings of civilians, one taking the lives of a leading Sunni Muslim scholar and 48 other worshippers in a Damascus mosque only recently and another killing 100 people, amongst them children waiting for their school bus. A country Gamal abd al Nasir once described as the ‘beating heart of Arabism’ is being destroyed. Its enemies have their hands inside the body and they intend to rip the heart out. The cooperative at work on this venture includes the US, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and the local and foreign-born jihadis who are their tools whether they realize it or not.

That the Syrian system needs changing goes without saying. In Syria possibly no-one understands this better than the much reviled Bashar al Assad. He could go tomorrow but that would solve nothing because the system would stay the same; for those who hate him, someone worse might take his place. Bashar has made serious mistakes, including the adoption of free market policies which have enriched the merchant class while further impoverishing the peasantry, who are now said to be many of the foot soldiers of the armed groups, but Syria is an easier place than it was under his father.

The abolition of the Baath as the central pillar of state and society and the multi-party elections held last year were a start to political reforms. The elections were not perfect but if anyone is looking for perfection in the Middle East, they should look somewhere else. These are threads that could have been teased out if the collective calling itself ‘The Friends of the Syrian People’ had any serious interest in the best interests of the Syrian people. A process of national dialogue has begun in Damascus but this has been ignored, too, because these ‘friends’ want nothing less than the destruction of a government which is a strategic ally of Iran and Hezbollah and forms with them the ‘resistance axis’ to US-Israeli hegemony.

The achievements of this axis need to be set against the record of collaboration of those Arab governments who are now bent on destroying it. Iran and Syria have been solid in their support for the Palestinians, hosting resistance movements and working together to provide Hamas with the weapons it needed to defend Gaza. No weapons came from the direction of Saudi Arabia or Qatar.

It was Hezbollah, the non-state partner in this alliance, that finally drove Israel from occupied southern Lebanon after nearly two decades of struggle involving not just the bravery of part-time soldiers but the mastery of electronic warfare, enabling Hezbollah to penetrate Israeli communications, including drone surveillance, as was made clear when Hasan Nasrallah produced intercepted film showing that an Israeli drone had been shadowing Rafiq Hariri for three months and was overhead when he was assassinated in February, 2005. When Israel tried to take revenge in 2006 it was humiliated. Hezbollah stood firm, destroyed its supposedly invincible Merkava tanks, disabled one of its warships in a missile attack and prevented its ground forces from advancing north of the Litani river. At the time, it might be remembered, both Egypt and Saudi Arabia vilified Hasan Nasrallah for bringing on this war, as they saw it.

It was Hezbollah which scored another triumph by breaking Israel’s spy network in Lebanon, now in the public eye because of the revelations that an Australian-born Mossad agent, Ben Zygier, had provided it with the names of two of its agents. The official Israeli version of the Zygier affair is that he handed over this information with the ultimate intention of setting up the assassination of Hasan Nasrallah. However, as the case is regarded as one of the most serious threats to national security in Israel’s history, much more might be involved than the collapse of a spy network. It is hard to imagine any agent who was not in fact a double agent doing what Zygier is reported to have done. What other information he might have passed on is a matter of conjecture but Israel’s nervousness about this affair could be a sign that far darker secrets are involved than the exposure of two spies.

Both Iran and Syria have been targeted with economic sanctions because of their disobedience. Iran has been threatened with military attack ever since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and now that the attempt to destroy the government in Damascus through armed proxies has clearly failed, if more than two years of trying qualifies as failure, the US is sending out signals that it is prepared to intervene directly despite the regional and global risks. The collapse of the Syrian National Council last year has now been followed by the disintegration of the Syrian National Coalition, with ‘president’ Mu’adh al Khatib resigning and the chief of its military wing refusing to recognize the authority of new ‘prime minister’ Ghassan al Hitto. Riad al Assad, the displaced former commander of the self-styled Free Syrian Army, has just been carried back across the border into Turkey with only one leg, the other having been blown off by a roadside car bomb. Some sources say it was only a foot but either way he is out of action for a long time to come. As the leading armed groups do not recognize the authority of Mr Assad or the squabbling coalition of which the FSA is supposed to be the military arm, his absence from the scene is not going to make a great deal of difference.

For Muadh al Khatib to be given the Syria seat at the recent summit of the Arab League in Doha is farcical in more than one respect. Al Khatib is no longer even a member of the group Qatar is trying to set up as an alternative government. The group itself is in a state of complete collapse, with al Khatib walking out and other members rejecting the appointment of Hitto, a Syrian-born American who has not visited the country of his birth for decades. That Al Khatib should demand that his ragged, motley crew be given Syria’s seat at the UN goes beyond preposterous.

The government of Syria sits in Damascus, not Doha, and Bashar al Assad is still its president, not the former imam of the Umayyad mosque. Compounding this theatre of the absurd, it was the ruler of Qatar who directed that Al Khatib be given the Syrian seat at the Doha summit, underlining the degree to which the Arab League has become no more than an instrument of this gentleman’s drive for regional dominance. That King Abdullah should have stayed away from Doha is a sign of the deepening rivalry between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, especially over how to manage Syria. The determination of the ruler of Qatar to persevere with this chaotic bunch of exiles is the measure of his determination to destroy the government in Damascus.

On the ground the armed groups are taking a beating at the hands of the Syrian army but like an irresponsible trainer sending a punched-out boxer out from his corner for the next round, their outside sponsors are pouring arms into Syria to keep them on their feet.
The tactics of these groups include bombings aimed at civilians that in other circumstances their backers would not hesitate to call terrorism but steadfastly refused to call terrorism when Syrians are the victims and their proxies are the perpetrators.

 Al Khatib’s dissatisfaction with his ramshackle coalition was possibly brought to a head by the assassination in Damascus of Sheikh Muhammad Said Ramadan al Bouti, a former colleague and a man he greatly admired. Al Bouti and close to 50 other worshippers were murdered in the Iman mosque by a suicide bomber. Two days earlier an armed group had loaded CL 17 chlorine – an ingredient normally used in swimming pool cleaner – into the warhead of a small missile and fired it at a Syrian army checkpoint, killing 26 people. Soldiers were among the dead and the army was there to look after the survivors, so the claims of activists that ‘the regime’ was responsible had even less traction than usual. Having warned of direct intervention in Syria should chemical weapons be used, the US had little to say now that such a weapon had been used, not by the Syrian army, but by the ‘rebels’ it has been supporting.

Hezbollah, Syria and Iran’s record of resistance has to be compared with the long Saudi and Qatari record of collaboration with the US and Israel. Having deserted Damascus in its hour of need, what does Khalid Mishaal think he is going to get from the ruler of Qatar besides money and somewhere to stay?

 What is Ismail Haniyeh expecting from Muhammad Morsi, who began his presidency by blocking off the tunnels into Gaza and confirmed where he intends to take Egypt with his letter calling Shimon Peres ‘my dear friend’?

Is it forgotten already, apart from his record in violence and destruction going back to 1948, that it was Peres who authorized the attack on southern Lebanon in 1996 which took the lives of more than 100 people sheltering inside the UN compound in Qana?

If the friend of my enemy is my enemy, where does that leave Haniyeh, Misha’al and Abbas?

The beneficiaries of intervention in Iraq, Libya and Syria are outside and regional governments who have combined forces to reshape the Middle East in their own interests. As Ibrahim al Amin has remarked (‘Partitioning Syria at the Doha summit’, Al Akhbar English, March 25, 2013), they are fighting a global war against Syria in the name of bringing the people freedom and justice. In truth, western governments only intervene in their own interests and the people always end up being sliced and diced on the chopping board of their grand designs. There has been no exception to this rule. Civilization, liberation, freedom, democracy, the rights of the people and the responsibility to protect are the unctuous phrases that have rolled off the lips of western prime ministers, foreign ministers and presidents for two centuries. This is the rhetorical buildup to a self-assigned ‘duty’ to intervene: the only real difference between intervention in the 19th century and intervention in the 21st lies in the vastly increased killing power of western governments and the development of weapons that would have been regarded as science fiction until only recently.

As they always get away with it, there is no reason for them to stop. Iraq was a terrible crime but while the UN Security Council or the International Criminal Court points the finger at Robert Mugabe, Umar al Bashir or Saif al Islam al Gaddafi it never points the finger at western politicians whose crimes are infinitely greater. Slobodan Milosevic was a rare exception but even his crimes do not measure up to what George Bush and Tony Blair authorized in Iraq in and after 2003 – not to speak of the horrors that Bush senior, Clinton and Blair authorized through the decade of sanctions which followed the attack of 1991. Because they are protected by a world system which is highly selective about who it punishes, the politicians who follow them feel free to repeat the experience. They know that whoever suffers, whoever is bombed, whoever has to look at the faces of dead parents, children, aunts, grandfathers and neighbors being dug out of the rubble of bombed cities and towns, it is not going to be them. William Hague is perfectly comfortable in his desire to give more weapons to the ‘rebels’ because he knows that the calamitous consequences of decisions he takes are never going to bounce back on his own doorstep.

It is obvious but needs to be said anyway that the first priority of people across the Middle East should be solidarity rising above ethnic and religious divisions. No problem can be solved without it and certainly not the core issue of Palestine. In his recent Edward Said memorial lecture, Noam Chomsky drew attention to what is going on while the world’s attention is diverted by the ‘Arab spring.’ In 1967 the Jordan Valley had a Palestinian population of 300, 000. The policy of ‘purification’ pursued by the Israeli government has now reduced that population to 60,000. On a smaller scale the same policy has had the same results in Hebron and elsewhere in the occupied territories. There is nothing accidental or incidental about this. Netanyahu is no more than faithful to the racist policies set in motion by Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion. Continuing without letup for 65 years these policies are neither forgettable nor forgivable.

It is not surprising that Israel’s strongest supporters always have been similar colonial settler states. There are no exact parallels but the Zionist settlers in Palestine and the American colonists both turned on the mother state while setting out to crush the native people. Thomas Paine had much to say about the American ‘war of independence’ that is relevant to Palestine. First of all, it was it was an ‘independence war’ being fought on land long since inhabited by another people.

The colonists wanted to be independent of the mother country, which planted them in this foreign soil in the expectation that they would maintain it as part of the king’s domains. A loyal colony was what the British also sought in Palestine but the American settlers and later the Zionists had other ideas. The war between Britain and the American colonists was brutal, generating deep hatreds on both sides, just as the Zionist war against the British did in Palestine.

Paine was writing of settler feelings towards the savagery of the mother country but the words equally apply to the people who were the victims of double colonialism in North America or, nearly two centuries later, in Palestine:

‘Men of passive tempers look somewhat lightly over the offences of Great Britain and still hoping for the best are still apt to call out come, come, we shall be friends against for all this. But examine the passions and feelings of mankind; bring the doctrine of reconciliation to the touchstone of nature and then tell me whether you can hereafter love, honor and faithfully serve the power that hath carried fire and sword into your land. If you cannot do all these then you are only deceiving yourself, and by your delay bringing ruin upon posterity. Your future connections with Britain, whom you can neither love nor honor, will be forced and unnatural and being formed only on the plan of present convenience, will in a little time fall into a relapse more wretched than the first. But if you say you can still pass the violations over, then I ask hath your house been burnt? Hath your property been destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or child by their hands and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then you are not a judge of those who have. But if you have and can still shake hands with the murderers, then are you unworthy the name of husband, father, friend or lover; and whatever may be your rank or title in life you have the heart of a coward and the spirit of a sycophant.’

Paine was a democrat within the limitations of his time. He was writing for the settlers and had no thought of admitting the indigenous people of North America to representation in the colonies.

Except for the passage of almost 250 years Paine might be a Zionist today, but the two and a half centuries make all the difference. Israel was an anomaly from the beginning, a colonial state arising at the tail end of colonialism. It would be no more possible to imagine Thomas Paine supporting an America in which native and Afro-Americans did not have the vote now than it would be to imagine him supporting a situation where a people not only did not have the right to vote but had been denied the right to live on the land where they or their forebears had been born.

In today’s world Paine could not support an Israel built on blatantly racist and discriminatory lines. Everything he says in the passage quoted above applies to Israel. The wounds it has inflicted have gone deep and far from making any attempt to heal them Israel has endlessly inflicted new wounds. The state of Israel – to be differentiated from those pockets of its citizens who oppose its brutal mindset – is not interested in any kind of genuine settlement with the Palestinians. It is not interested in them as a people. It is not interested in their stories of suffering. It is not interested in its own guilt because it is blind to its own guilt. It has no humility and would scoff at the idea of penance for crimes it refuses to admit it has committed, like the worst recidivist offender hauled before a court. It is interested in the Palestinians only as a problem to be solved and the solution is for them somehow to disappear or to be made to disappear. Hence the ‘purification’ in the Jordan Valley and the daylight oppression of the Palestinians in Hebron and the racist demographic war being waged in East Jerusalem. These are crimes against humanity.

If we substitute Israel and the Oslo process for the reconciliation proffered by the British monarch the result is the same: the policy, wrote Thomas Paine, is there ‘in order that he may accomplish by craft and subtlety in the long run what he cannot do by force and violence in the short one’. His conclusion that ‘reconciliation and ruin are nearly related’ sums up the consequences for the Palestinians of the Venus fly trap known as the ‘peace process.’ Violence works but ‘peace’ has a deadly potency of its own: whatever the means employed, the Zionist aim of reducing the Palestinians to dust that will eventually be whirled away by history has not changed in 100 years.

By themselves, however bravely they have resisted, the Palestinians have never had the power to fend off the forces arrayed against them. This has been true from the time Britain implanted the Zionist project in Palestine until the present day. Britain and the US were not just any countries but the two most powerful states of their time and with their support both Zionist success and Palestinian failure were assured. Never have the Palestinians been able to draw on anything like such sources of strength despite the immense potential in their own backyard. Israel’s dominance as a regional power is still sustained by the US while being continually replenished by Arab weakness: Arab weakness is built on chronic Arab disunity, now being promoted in sectarian form by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. As long as there is no way out of this trap the Palestinians will remain stuck in their trap.

Sectarianism is a powerful weapon but would be useless if people were not susceptible to it. A people divided are doomed to be dominated. George Antonius prefaced The Arab Awakening with a quote from Ibrahim Yaziji: ‘Arise Arabs and awake!’ That was in 1938. An Arab awakening did follow and while it would be tempting to say the Arab world has gone back to sleep, in reality what is happening is far worse than sleep. A fire is raging and it is hard to see how and when it will be put out.

– Jeremy Salt is an associate professor of Middle Eastern history and politics at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

Defiant Land… Faithful Land…. Holy Land

Painting walls and doors blue
will not make it “Jewish”

Waving angry flags up and down
will not make it “Jewish”

Scribbling around fantasies and lies
will not make it “Jewish”

Destroying evidence of deep rooted history
will not make it “Jewish”

Uprooting trees and stealing livelihoods
will not make it “Jewish”

Desecrating monasteries where peace is the prayer
will not make it “Jewish”

Writing Hebrew words on stolen olive oil
will not make it “Jewish”

Burning fruit trees to tighten the squeeze
will not make it “Jewish”

Shredding Holy books to pieces, with a grin
will not make it “Jewish”

Erasing a country from the world map
will not make it “Jewish”

Moving in, at gun point to some family home
will not make it “Jewish”

Disfiguring kuffiah with blue pointed stars
will not make it “Jewish”

Claiming God is a real-estate agent favouring his “chosen”
will not make it “Jewish”

Invading fully armed, a mosque or a church
will not make it “Jewish”

Destroying landscapes, for eyesore construction
will not make it “Jewish”

Bombing hills and mountains while hiding the crime
will not make it “Jewish”

Defiant Land

Faithful Land

Holy Land

Her stones yearn to be caressed

Only by those hands

which tenderly carved

NOTHING… NOTHING of what they do will ever make it “Jewish”

Defiant Land

Faithful Land

Holy Land

Her heart beats only

for those gentle eyes

which watered her with tears

she passionately adores

NOTHING… NOTHING of what they do will ever make it “Jewish”

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

DALET Zionism’s diabolical blueprint

DALET: The conspiracy to steal the land of Palestine

Plan D shows ‘expulsion and transfer’ were always a key part of the Zionists’ scheme.

by Stuart Littlewood, source

I have to admit, I was only dimly aware of the Dalet Plan before reading Alan Hart’s latest article ’The green light for Zionism’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine’.

The Dalet Plan, or Plan D, was the Zionist terror mob’s diabolical blueprint for the violent and blood-spattered takeover of the Palestinian homeland – some call it the Palestinian holocaust – written 65 years ago and based on three earlier schemes drafted between 1945 and 1948. It was drawn up by the Jewish underground militia, the Haganah, at the behest of David Ben-Gurion, then boss of the Jewish Agency.

Plan D was a carefully thought-out, step-by-step plot choreographed in advance of the British mandate government’s withdrawal and the Zionists’ declaration of Israeli statehood. It correctly assumed that the British authorities would no longer be there. Indeed, the British had completed their departure by 15 May 1948.

(Palestinian Nakba- file photo)

The Plan’s intention, on the surface, was to gain control of the areas of the Jewish state and defend its borders. But it also aimed to do much more. It included measures to control the areas of Jewish settlements and concentrations located outside Jewish borders and ensure “freedom of military and economic activity” by occupying and controlling important high-ground positions on a number of transport routes.

This would be achieved by, amongst other things, “applying economic pressure on the enemy by besieging some of his cities”, “encirclement of enemy cities” and “blocking the main enemy transportation routes… Roads, bridges, main passes, important crossroads, paths, etc. must be blocked by means of: acts of sabotage, explosions, series of barricades, mine fields, as well as by controlling the elevations near roads and taking up positions there.”

Jewish forces would occupy the police stations, described as “fortresses”, fifty of which had been built by the British throughout Palestine after the Arab unrest of 1936-39.

The Plan discussed “operations against enemy population centers located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force.” These operations included:

“Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously.

“Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.”

Villages emptied in this way were then fortified. “Outside the borders of the state” seems a curious thing to say since nobody was saying then where Israel’s borders ran, and nobody is saying now.
If they met no resistance, “garrison troops will enter the village and take up positions in it or in locations which enable complete tactical control,” said the Plan. “The officer in command of the unit will confiscate all weapons, wireless devices, and motor vehicles in the village. In addition, he will detain all politically suspect individuals… In every region, a [Jewish] person will be appointed to be responsible for arranging the political and administrative affairs of all [Arab] villages and population centers which are occupied within that region.

And here are the chilling guidelines for besieging, occupying and controlling Arab cities:
“1. By isolating them from transportation arteries by laying mines, blowing up bridges, and a system of fixed ambushes.
2. If necessary, by occupying high points which overlook transportation arteries leading to enemy cities, and the fortification of our units in these positions.
3. By disrupting vital services, such as electricity, water, and fuel, or by using economic resources available to us, or by sabotage.
4. By launching a naval operation against the cities that can receive supplies by sea, in order to destroy the vessels carrying the provisions, as well as by carrying out acts of sabotage against harbor facilities.”

It is one of the sickest documents in history and shows why so many people question Israel’s legitimacy. Jewish terror gangs committed a massacre at Deir Yassin to set the tone and ‘soften up’ the Arabs for expulsion. More atrocities followed the declaration of Israeli statehood on 14 May 1948. 750,000 Palestinians were put to flight as Israel’s forces obliterated hundreds of Arab villages and towns. The village on which Sderot now stands was one such. To this day they have been denied the right to return and received no compensation. 34 massacres are said to have been committed in pursuit of the Jewish nation’s racist and territorial ambitions.

White Colonialist Club

The UN Partition of Palestine in 1947 cannot stand close scrutiny. At that time, UN membership did not include African states, and most Arab and Asian states were still under colonial rule. It was pretty much a white colonialist club. The Palestinians themselves had no representation and they weren’t even consulted.

The first vote failed to reach the two-thirds majority required. To ensure success in the second vote a good deal of arm-twisting was applied to the smaller countries, but again it fell short. At the third attempt France was persuaded to come “on board” after the US threatened to withdraw desperately needed post-WW2 aid, and on 29 November the UN voted to partition Palestine into three parts: a Jewish state on 14,000 sq km with some 558,000 Jews and 405,000 Palestinian Arabs; and an Arab state on 11,500 sq km with about 804,000 Palestinian Arabs and 10,000 Jews. Jerusalem, including major religious sites, was to be internationally administered.

No sooner had Britain packed her bags than Israel declared statehood on 14 May 1948 and immediately began expanding territorial control across all of Palestine to accommodate a new Jewish state expanding on all fronts. 15 May marks the dark day in 1948 remembered by Palestinians as al-Nakba (the Catastrophe) brought about by the military terror that forced them off their homeland.
Atrocities occurred at Deir Yassin, Lod and Ramle. The massacre at Deir Yassin was carried out by the two Zionist terror groups, the Irgun and the Stern Gang. On an April morning in 1948 (before the Israeli state declaration) 130 of their commandos made a dawn raid on this small Arab town with a population of 750, to the west of Jerusalem. The attack was initially beaten off, and only when a crack unit of the Haganah arrived with mortars were the Arab townsmen overwhelmed. The Irgun and the Stern Gang, smarting from the humiliation of having to summon help, embarked on a ‘clean-up’ in which they systematically murdered and executed at least 100 residents – mostly women, children and old people. The Irgun afterwards exaggerated the number, quoting 254, to frighten other Arab towns and villages.

The Haganah played down their part in the raid and afterwards said the massacre “disgraced the cause of Jewish fighters and dishonoured Jewish arms and the Jewish flag”.

Deir Yassin signaled the beginning of a deliberate programme by Israel to depopulate Arab towns and villages – destroying churches and mosques – in order to make room for incoming Holocaust survivors and other Jews. In any language it was an exercise in ethnic cleansing, the knock-on effects of which have created an estimated 4 million Palestinian refugees today.

In July 1948 Israeli terrorist troops seized Lydda, shot up the town and drove out the population. Donald Neff reported, as part of the ethnic cleansing, the Israelis massacred 426 men, women, and children. 176 of them were slaughtered in the town’s main mosque.

The remainder were forced to walk into exile in the scalding July heat leaving a trail of bodies – men, women and children – along the way.

Of all the blood-baths they say this was the biggest. The great hero Moshe Dayan was responsible. Was he ever brought to book? Of course not.

By 1949 the Zionists had seized nearly 80 percent of Palestine, provoking the resistance backlash that still goes on.

Even if the UN Partition had been legitimate – which many people doubt – the Israeli state’s greedy ambition immediately overran the generous borders gifted to the Zionists. Few, if any, of the Jews imported into Palestine can trace ancestral connection with the Jews who were driven out by the Roman occupation. As Lord Sydenham warned when he opposed the Balfour Declaration, they are an alien population dumped on an Arab country. “What we have done,” he predicted, “by concessions not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, is to start a running sore in the East, and no-one can tell how far that sore will extend.”

Israel’s numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity, and its continual defiance of international law and the UN Charter, together forfeit all claim to legitimacy as far as Arabs and non-Arabs around the world are concerned – at least, those that haven’t been bribed to say otherwise.
UN Resolution 194 called on Israel to let the Palestinians back onto their land. It has been re-passed many times, but Israel still ignores it. The Israelis also stand accused of violating Article 42 of the Geneva Convention by moving settlers into the Palestinian territories it occupies, and of riding roughshod over international law with their occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

As Plan D shows, “expulsion and transfer” (i.e. ethnic cleansing) were always a key part of the Zionists’ scheme. According to historian Benny Morris no mainstream Zionist leader could conceive of future co-existence without a clear physical separation between the two peoples. Ben-Gurion, who became Israel’s first prime minister, is reported to have said in 1937: “New settlement will not be possible without transferring the Arab fellahin…” The following year he declared: “With compulsory transfer we have a vast area [for settlement]… I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.”

On another occasion he remarked: “If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it is true, but 2,000 years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.” Ben-Gurion reminded his military commanders that the prime aim of Plan D was the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. He was well aware of his own criminality.

It is high time the Palestine solidarity movement circulated Plan D/Plan Dalet far and wide and, in particular, brought it to the attention of political half-wits who stooge for and support the Israeli regime and turn a blind eye to its unbridled terrorism.                                              

DALET: another dirty word in the conspiracy to steal the land of Palestine

Zionist terror plan is still legitimized by political half-wits in the West 

By Stuart Littlewood
I have to admit, I was only dimly aware of the Dalet Plan before reading Alan Hart’s latest article, “The green light for Zionism’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine”.
The Dalet Plan, or Plan D, was the Zionist terror mob’s diabolical blueprint for the violent and blood-spattered takeover of the Palestinian homeland – some call it the Palestinian holocaust – written 65 years ago and based on three earlier schemes drafted between 1945 and 1948. It was drawn up by the Jewish underground militia, the Haganah, at the behest of David Ben-Gurion, then boss of the Jewish Agency.

Blood-splattered diabolical blueprint

Plan D was a carefully thought-out, step-by-step plot choreographed in advance of the British mandate government’s withdrawal and the Zionists’ declaration of Israeli statehood. It correctly assumed that the British authorities would no longer be there. Indeed, the British had completed their departure by 15 May 1948.
The Plan’s intention, on the surface, was to gain control of the areas of the Jewish state and defend its borders. But it also aimed to do much more. It included measures to control the areas of Jewish settlements and concentrations located outside Jewish borders and ensure “freedom of military and economic activity” by occupying and controlling important high-ground positions on a number of transport routes.
This would be achieved by, among other things, applying economic pressure on the enemy by besieging some of his cities”, “encirclement of enemy cities” and “blocking the main enemy transportation routes… Roads, bridges, main passes, important crossroads, paths, etc. must be blocked by means of: acts of sabotage, explosions, series of barricades, minefields, as well as by controlling the elevations near roads and taking up positions there.
Jewish forces would occupy the police stations, described as “fortresses”, fifty of which had been built by the British throughout Palestine after the Arab unrest of 1936-39.
The plan discussed “operations against enemy population centres located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force”. These operations included:

Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centres which are difficult to control continuously.
Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.

Villages emptied in this way were then fortified. “Outside the borders of the state” seems a curious thing to say since nobody was saying then where Israel’s borders ran, and nobody is saying now.
If they met no resistance, “garrison troops will enter the village and take up positions in it or in locations which enable complete tactical control”, said the plan.

The officer in command of the unit will confiscate all weapons, wireless devices and motor vehicles in the village. In addition, he will detain all politically suspect individuals… In every region, a [Jewish] person will be appointed to be responsible for arranging the political and administrative affairs of all [Arab] villages and population centres which are occupied within that region.

And here are the chilling guidelines for besieging, occupying and controlling Arab cities…

1. By isolating them from transportation arteries by laying mines, blowing up bridges, and a system of fixed ambushes.
2. If necessary, by occupying high points which overlook transportation arteries leading to enemy cities, and the fortification of our units in these positions.
3. By disrupting vital services, such as electricity, water and fuel, or by using economic resources available to us, or by sabotage.
4. By launching a naval operation against the cities that can receive supplies by sea, in order to destroy the vessels carrying the provisions, as well as by carrying out acts of sabotage against harbour facilities.

It is one of the sickest documents in history and shows why so many people question Israel’s legitimacy. Jewish terror gangs committed a massacre at Deir Yassin to set the tone and “soften up” the Arabs for expulsion. More atrocities followed the declaration of Israeli statehood on 14 May 1948. Some 750,000 Palestinians were put to flight as Israel’s forces obliterated hundreds of Arab villages and towns. The village on which Sderot now stands was one such. To this day they have been denied the right to return and received no compensation. Thirty-four massacres are said to have been committed in pursuit of the Jewish nation’s racist and territorial ambitions.

Was Israel ever “legitimate”?

The UN Partition of Palestine in 1947 cannot stand close scrutiny. At that time, UN membership did not include African states, and most Arab and Asian states were still under colonial rule. It was pretty much a white colonialist club. The Palestinians themselves had no representation and they weren’t even consulted.

…15 May marks the dark day in 1948 remembered by Palestinians as the Nakba (the Catastrophe) brought about by the military terror that forced them off their homeland.

The first vote failed to reach the two-thirds majority required. To ensure success in the second vote a good deal of arm-twisting was applied to the smaller countries, but again it fell short. At the third attempt France was persuaded to come “on board” after the US threatened to withdraw desperately needed post-World War II aid, and on 29 November the UN voted to partition Palestine into three parts: a Jewish state on 14,000 sq km with some 558,000 Jews and 405,000 Palestinian Arabs; and an Arab state on 11,500 sq km with about 804,000 Palestinian Arabs and 10,000 Jews. Jerusalem, including major religious sites, was to be internationally administered.
No sooner had Britain packed its bags than Israel declared statehood on 14 May 1948 and immediately began expanding territorial control across all of Palestine to accommodate a new Jewish state expanding on all fronts. The date of 15 May marks the dark day in 1948 remembered by Palestinians as the Nakba (the Catastrophe) brought about by the military terror that forced them off their homeland.

Two of many massacres

Atrocities occurred at Deir Yassin, Lod and Ramle. The massacre at Deir Yassin was carried out by the two Zionist terror groups, the Irgun and the Stern Gang. On an April morning in 1948 (before the Israeli state declaration) 130 of their commandos made a dawn raid on this small Arab town with a population of 750, to the west of Jerusalem. The attack was initially beaten off, and only when a crack unit of the Haganah arrived with mortars were the Arab townsmen overwhelmed. The Irgun and the Stern Gang, smarting from the humiliation of having to summon help, embarked on a “clean-up” in which they systematically murdered and executed at least 100 residents – mostly women, children and old people. The Irgun afterwards exaggerated the number, quoting 254, to frighten other Arab towns and villages.

Deir Yassin signalled the beginning of a deliberate programme by Israel to depopulate Arab towns and villages – destroying churches and mosques – in order to make room for incoming holocaust survivors and other Jews.

The Haganah played down their part in the raid and afterwards said the massacre “disgraced the cause of Jewish fighters and dishonoured Jewish arms and the Jewish flag”.
Deir Yassin signalled the beginning of a deliberate programme by Israel to depopulate Arab towns and villages – destroying churches and mosques – in order to make room for incoming holocaust survivors and other Jews. In any language it was an exercise in ethnic cleansing, the knock-on effects of which have created an estimated 4 million Palestinian refugees today.
In July 1948 Israeli terrorist troops seized Lydda, shot up the town and drove out the population. Donald Neff reported how, as part of the ethnic cleansing, the Israelis massacred 426 men, women and children. Some 176 of them were slaughtered in the town’s main mosque. The remainder were forced to walk into exile in the scalding July heat, leaving a trail of bodies – men, women and children – along the way.
Of all the blood-baths they say this was the biggest.The great hero Moshe Dayan was responsible. Was he ever brought to book? Of course not.
By 1949 the Zionists had seized nearly 80 per cent of Palestine, provoking the resistance backlash that still goes on.
Even if the UN Partition had been legitimate – which many people doubt – the Israeli state’s greedy ambition immediately overran the generous borders gifted to the Zionists. Few, if any, of the Jews imported into Palestine can trace ancestral connection with the Jews who were driven out by the Roman occupation. As Lord Sydenham warned when he opposed the Balfour Declaration, they are an alien population dumped on an Arab country. “What we have done,” he predicted, “by concessions not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, is to start a running sore in the East, and no-one can tell how far that sore will extend.”

…as part of the ethnic cleansing, [in Lydda] the Israelis massacred 426 men, women and children. Some 176 of them were slaughtered in the town’s main mosque.

Israel’s numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity, and its continual defiance of international law and the UN Charter, together forfeit all claim to legitimacy as far as Arabs and non-Arabs around the world are concerned – at least, those that haven’t been bribed to say otherwise.
UN Resolution 194 called on Israel to let the Palestinians back onto their land. It has been reiterated many times, but Israel still ignores it. The Israelis also stand accused of violating Article 42 of the Geneva Convention by moving settlers into the Palestinian territories it occupies, and of riding roughshod over international law with their occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
As Plan D shows, “expulsion and transfer” (i.e. ethnic cleansing) were always a key part of the Zionists’ scheme. According to historian Benny Morris, no mainstream Zionist leader could conceive of future coexistence without a clear physical separation between the two peoples. Ben-Gurion, who became Israel’s first prime minister, is reported to have said in 1937: “New settlement will not be possible without transferring the Arab fallahin [peasants]…” The following year he declared: “With compulsory transfer we have a vast area [for settlement]… I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.”
On another occasion he remarked:

If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it is true, but 2,000 years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.

Ben-Gurion reminded his military commanders that the prime aim of Plan D was the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. He was well aware of his own criminality.
It is high time the Palestine solidarity movement circulated Plan D/Plan Dalet far and wide and, in particular, brought it to the attention of political half-wits who stooge for and support the Israeli regime and turn a blind eye to its unbridled terrorism.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

FILM: Palestinian Refugees: Time to Return NOW

by deLiberation
Tuesday, March 5th, 2013

A report by Chris Den Hond and Mireille Court, 27 min.
10 million Palestinians. More than 5 million of them are refugees. And half of those are still living in camps. It is in Lebanon that the Palestinian refugees live under the worst conditions. We visited the camps of Chatila, Borj Al Barajneh, Marelias, Nahr Al Bared, Badawi, Ain El Hilweh et Rachidiya. Everywhere we find great poverty, a dense population, narrow lanes, a maze of electric wires all connected to each other, workshops for small manual jobs… but everywhere also the same steadfast will to returnto their country, Palestine.

Previous film : Free in the prison of Gaza a report with the liberated palestinian prisoners (25 min.) in Arabic : http://youtu.be/ZXUE0bcg2hk and in English : http://youtu.be/nDvi75pnctU

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Is the Anti-Occupation Movement Driven by Defenders of Genocide?

Wednesday, March 6, 2013 at 5:37PM Gilad Atzmon

by Dr. PAUL LARUDEE
http://www.counterpunch.org/

If there is one message that unifies critics of Israel and advocates for Palestinian rights, it is “End the Occupation.” As with many unifying messages, however, it is successful partly because of its ambiguity. What land and which people are occupied? And what are the terms under which the “occupation” will be ended.

The ambiguity allows groups as disparate as Hamas and J Street to chant the phrase with very different images in mind. Hamas and other anti-Zionists argue that all of the land defined by the British Mandate of Palestine is occupied territory, while J Streeters and other “soft” Zionists commonly refer only to Israel’s 1967 territorial conquests as “occupied.”

The dividing line between these two views has been articulated By Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi of JBIG (Jews Boycotting Israeli Goods):

…there are many people within the movement who share the opinion – which is general throughout the West – that Israel needs to exist as a Jewish state, should exist as a Jewish state. And there are many Jews and others in the movement who don’t want to criticize that fundamental fact.[i]

Wimborne-Idrissi is undoubtedly correct in her assessment: public opinion in the West generally supports what is called “Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.”[ii] However, most Palestinians fail to understand why this “right” should trump their rights and why Palestinians should be made to pay for its exercise with expulsion from their homes.

Indeed, they may be forgiven for doubting the sincerity of people that claim to advocate for justice on their behalf but fail to defend their right to return to their homes. On the one hand, these “defenders” of Palestinian human rights claim to oppose Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians, both inside the internationally recognized borders of Israel and in other areas under Israeli control. On the other hand, these same champions of Palestinians will not lift a finger to correct and defend against the more massive ethnic cleansing that occurred in 1948. It is as if 1967 is the dividing line between which criminal activity must be accepted and which must be resisted.

Do such persons really oppose ethnic cleansing as a matter of principle or merely as it suits their whim? The passage of time does not appear to be an issue. If 1948 seems like a long time ago, let us remember that there is no statute of limitations on such matters, as the prosecution of Nazi war criminals from an even earlier era illustrates.

J Streeters and other “soft” Zionists may appear to be allies of Palestinians, but they are not. Their overwhelming consideration is to create and maintain a Jewish state, and to mould it into their image of a liberal democracy that they can feel proud of. Palestinian rights and welfare are entirely subsidiary to that objective.

This explains why J Streeters defend Israel’s “right to exist,” i.e. the ethnic cleansing of 1948. They may not like ethnic cleansing, but it was necessary for the creation of a Jewish state, which has a higher order of priority. On the other hand, they see the current ethnic cleansing policies of the state of Israel as corrosive to the kind of state they would like to have. This is why they want to “end the occupation.” Look what it is doing to Israeli youth! Look at how it is driving Israel into the hands of “extremists.”

Let us therefore be clear. We are dealing with people whose opposition to ethnic cleansing is not very firm and whose primary interest in “ending the occupation” is to do what is good for Israel, not for humanity and least of all for Palestinians.[iii]

Indeed, one wonders why these advocates for Israel oppose a massive expulsion of the remaining Palestinians in all of the land held by Israel. Expulsion is clearly not a “red line” for them, and it is an expedient method of “ending the occupation.” I suspect that they harbor a nagging guilt for the theft and massacres of 1948, but not enough to want to give up the stolen property. Rather, they hope to expiate their guilt by returning a portion of the territories seized in 1967 for the purpose of creating Palestinian Bantustans. (The South African Bantustans served a similar purpose of assuaging the guilt of white supremacists.)

Regardless of the hypocritical games that Jewish supremacists in the movement play amongst themselves, Palestinians and human rights advocates must not be lured into false partnerships with them just because we share some of the same immediate tactics and objectives, such as stopping the growth of Jewish settlements, boycott of (some) Israeli products and institutions, an end to land confiscations, etc. Rather, we must expose the racist foundations and objectives of these ethically inconsistent elements within “the movement,” and avoid alliances with them.
Currently, I fear that we may be doing the opposite, i.e. allowing the “end the occupation” movement to be driven by the interests of people whose agenda requires Palestinians to give up inalienable rights and which rewards those who take those rights away from them.[iv] It is not in the interest of Palestinians and principled human rights advocates to make common cause with such morally compromised persons.

Dr. Paul Larudee is a human rights advocate and one of the co-founders of the movement to break the siege of Gaza by sea. He was deported from India on 31^st December, 2012.

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[i] Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gVT6abeaGas
 

[ii] International law does not provide for the right of states to exist. Rather, states come and go as a matter of historical and social forces. International law describes the rights and obligations of states, but does not require that any given state must exist.
 

[iii] Gilad Atzmon (The Wandering Who, Winchester: Zero Books, 2011, p. 102) makes a similar argument with respect to Jewish anti-Zionists, i.e. that they are motivated by what is good for Jews and that they believe that a Jewish state is bad for the Jews. Atzmon contends that this is just another instance of Jewish exceptionalism, which will be the cause of injustice even if the form of the injustice is not Zionism per se. Even if this is the case, social justice groups are notorious for pursuing justice while failing to practice it, and this may be an instance of such. I do not discount the possibility that cliquishness, tribalism and exceptionalism are causes of injustice in many cases, but ridding human nature of this tendency is beyond the scope of most advocacy efforts, even if it deserves a place in all of them.
 

[iv] An instance of this is the Palestinian BNC (BDS National Committee). Although nominally Palestinian, its main website is in English, with the Arabic translation largely unfinished. An unauthorized amendment to its original mission statement, inserted at an unknown time, appears to remove the property seizures of 1948 from consideration as occupied Palestinian Arab land. This appears to be a concession to “soft” Zionist elements within the BNC-led BDS movement. The amended statement does not appear in any authorized Arabic version of the mission statement.

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The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

Israeli newspaper accuses army of "ethnic cleansing"

Source

 

Haaretz, accused Israel on Monday of carrying out the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians in certain areas of the West Bank.

After driving Palestinians out of their villages to purportedly set up military exercise bases, the Israeli daily, Haaretz, accused Israel on Monday of carrying out the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians in certain areas of the West Bank.

 

In its editorial, the newspaper mentioned when and how many times Israeli displacement campaigns had taken place. It also mentioned how many persons were displaced. “They removed 60 Palestinians, including 36 children, and destroyed 46 tents and improvised structures,” the editorial said.

 

“Thirty-two emergency tents from the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations given to the residents after the destruction were confiscated two days later. The soldiers checked every vehicle at the site to make sure none were carrying humanitarian goods, and the water in the tanks was poured out.”

 

The newspaper clearly accused Israel of causing “grave injustice to dozens of old, poverty-stricken communities that make a living from herding and farming.”

 

“This is part of the consistent implementation of a nationalist policy”, the newspaper said, “Based on the desire to uproot entire Palestinian populations from Area C and transfer them to Area A. In its desire to cleanse strategic centres of the West Bank ‏(South Hebron Hills, the Khan al-Ahmar area and northern Jordan Valley‏) of Palestinian residents.”

 

“Apart from the fact that this is a cruel and inhuman policy that stands in opposition to every democratic and civilised principle, this behaviour proves that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s call to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to renew peace negotiations is nothing but a ploy.”

According to the editorial, “the declared reason for the destruction is usually military exercises.” In 2012, the IDF ordered the 17 communities of shepherds and farmers to temporarily leave their tents eight times for this reason.

 

“But despite the fact that firing ranges already make up 45.7 per cent of the area of the Jordan Valley, this is not enough for Israel. 20 per cent of the area was declared a nature reserve; hundreds of thousands of mines were laid in the area; and 2,500 dunams ‏(about 625 acres‏) that were farmed by Palestinians were confiscated for the separation barrier.”

 

“In total, out of an area of 1.6 million dunams in the Jordan Valley, Israel has seized 1.25 million – some 77.5 per cent – where Palestinians are forbidden to enter.”

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Judaization = Racism? Really?

Wednesday, January 23, 2013 at 7:12AM Gilad Atzmon

By Paul Larudee

Artwork by Carlos Latuff, all rights reserved.

On Sunday, January 20, 2013, the “progressive” Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a short editorial titled “‘Judaization’ is racism”.[i]

Before you get your hopes up, let me tell you that the editorial is a criticism of Shimon Gapso, the Jewish mayor of Upper Nazareth, a community intended to diminish the Arab character of Nazareth, the largest Palestinian Arab city inside what most of the world recognizes as Israel.

Founded in 1957, Upper Nazareth was given priority for development and expansion as part of a campaign by Yitzhak Rabin. The impetus was a trip that Rabin made to the Galilee in 1975. At one point he found himself in the Carmel valley. Looking around, he saw nothing but Palestinian farms and villages. “Am I in Israel or in Syria?” he uttered, whereupon he lent his weight to the mission to “judaize the Galilee”. Upper Nazareth is one of the Jewish communities that became an important of that mission. It was intended to limit the growth of Nazareth and ultimately marginalize or displace it.

Ironically, however, the “Jewish character” of Upper Nazareth is itself being compromised, as Palestinians from Nazareth find that there is no longer enough room in the older city to accommodate their growing population. In response, the mayor of Upper Nazareth has tried to make the city as unfriendly as possible to its non-Jewish residents, including opposition to Arabic language schools in the town and a much-publicized ban on Christmas trees. (Most of the Palestinians in Upper Nazareth are Christian.) The Haaretz editorial is a criticism of the “benighted racist position that sees the presence of Arabs in the Galilee or anywhere else as a national threat.”

Nice words, but is not the entire Zionist project one of “judaization”? Is that not how its founders conceived it? Is not Israel itself the product of “judaization”? What is different about Upper Nazareth? What about the expulsion of the Bedouin in the Naqab (“Negev”)? Is the confiscation and demolition of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem not merely an extension of the ethnic cleansing of 1948? How are the orders to evacuate and obliterate eight villages in the hills south of al-Khalil (“Hebron”) not consistent with the aims of Zionism?

If Haaretz wishes to oppose judaization, why not start with the judaization of 1948? Let them insist upon inviting all Palestinians back to their homes. Let them demand elimination of an immigration policy that is for Jews only. Let them call upon the Custodian for Absentee Property – who is responsible for the more than 80% of Israel that was confiscated from Palestinians in 1948 – to welcome the absentees back and return their property to them, with payment for damages and compensation for 65 years of unauthorized usage. Let them oppose a policy of separate states for Arabs and Jews (forgetting that many are both or neither).

Judaization is just another word for Zionism. And yes, it’s racism.

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[i] http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/judaization-is-racism.premium-1.494990
 

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Fascism Wins Big in Israel

by Stephen Lendman

Israeli election results hardened fascist rule. Dominant right-wing parties control 102 of 120 Knesset seats. 

Israelis have themselves to blame. They elected Israel’s most extremist government in history. Militarism, belligerence, state-sponsored terrorism, occupation ruthlessness, settlement expansions, and neoliberal harshness reflect official policy.

Peace is a non-starter. A so-called process never existed and doesn’t now. Israel won’t tolerate it. Netanyahu scorns it. He calls it a waste of time. 
 

Palestinians and Israeli Arabs have the greatest cross to bear. They’re marginalized, denied, persecuted and brutalized. 

Institutionalized racism terrorizes them. Their rights are off the table. Israeli Arabs are enfranchised in name only. 

Millions of Occupied Palestinians are entirely denied. They’re disenfranchised. They had no say in Tuesday’s election. Around 600,000 West Bank/East Jerusalem settlers alone got to vote.
 

Imagine holding an election excluding millions. Imagine calling fascism, colonization, apartheid and militarized occupation democratic. Imagine extolling the results. Imagine ignoring police state terror. 
 

Imagine coverup and denial. Imagine the world community and scoundrel media turning a blind eye. Imagine ignoring what demands headlines. 
 

Don’t expect media scoundrels to explain. They spurn journalistic ethics. They mock truth and full disclosure. They’re pro-Israeli apologists. They sanitize and conceal its worst crimes. They call hardline fascism “centrist.”
 

On January 23, a New York Times editorial headlined “Israel’s Election,” saying:
 

Netanyahu was weakened. He’ll remain prime minister. “Centrist” partners will join him. Doing so will “temper his hard-right line” rule.
 

“The rejection of religious parties by an overwhelming majority of voters sends a signal that Israelis are tired of sectarian divisiveness and the often-oppressive policies that religious leaders have championed.”
 

Fact check

So-called Israeli centrism doesn’t exist. Hardline right-wing rule dominates. Religious parties are involved. Results showed they largely matched their 2009 performance.

The Times expressed “hope that the new government could be more receptive to a peace initiative. The vote suggests that if it is not, Israelis may give even more support next time to a centrist coalition not led by Mr. Netanyahu.”

Fact check

Israelis care more about quality of life, economic well-being, and security than international politics and peace negotiations. According to Israel Today:

“Compared to previous elections when the peace process was still one of, if not the primary topic, the 2013 election is further evidence that the land-for-peace process is dead in the eyes of most Israelis.”

Peace process politics reflects hypocrisy. It was stillborn from inception. It’s no exaggeration calling it the most specular deception in modern diplomatic history.

It never existed and doesn’t now. Former IDF chief/defense minister Moshe Dayan called occupation “permanent.” 

Former prime minster Yitzhak Shamir said he wanted to drag out talks for a decade. Doing so would facilitate settlement expansions, he explained.

Netanyahu and likeminded hardliners spurn peace. They prioritize militarized occupation, settlement construction, brutalized repression, Jerusalem as Israel’s exclusive capital, and unchallenged dominance.

Decades of so-called peace talks used slogans and deception to buy time. Israel took full advantage. It doesn’t negotiate. It demands.

Oslo reflected unilateral Palestinian surrender. Land theft accelerated. Settlements expanded. From 1993 to today, population numbers grew from 200,000 – 600,000.

Apartheid is policy. So is colonization. Israel wants all valued Judea and Samaria areas Judaized. It claims Jerusalem as its exclusive capital. Ethnic cleansing is policy. At most, Palestinians will get worthless cantonized scrubland.

They got nothing for renouncing armed struggle, recognizing Israel’s right to exist, and leaving major unresolved issues for later final status talks. They’re still waiting.

Major issues include sovereign Palestine free from occupation, the right of return, settlements, borders, water rights, and East Jerusalem as Palestinian territory and future capital.

“The Israeli Center Lives,” said Times contributor Roger Cohen. Netanyahu has “himself to blame.” He “had no new ideas.”

“The price of his survival….will almost certainly be a pivot away from the right toward a centrist coalition.”

“The Israel that emerged from (Tuesday’s) vote is not the rightward-drifting, annexationist-tending, religious-lurching nation it has become fashionable to portray.”

Fact check

Rose-colored glasses obscure reality. Calling Israel centrist turns truth on its head. Dominant parties spurn democracy. They reflect Zionist extremism. They claim Jewish supremacy.

They deplore peace. They embrace violence, not peaceful coexistence. They endorse confrontation over diplomacy.

They believe in strength through militarism, intimidation, and naked aggression. They menace Jews and Arabs alike. They threaten neighboring states and humanity.

The Wall Street Journal headlined “Israel’s New Political Center,” saying:

Netanyahu remains prime minister with “different partners.” Israel’s “center” held. “Conventional wisdom” was wrong.

The Washington Post said Netanyahu’s “weakened” position “raised the prospect of a more centrist government that could ease strained relations with Washington and signal more flexibility in peace efforts with the Palestinians.”

The Los Angeles Times said Netanyahu’s “disappointing performance will require him to reach out to the center in order to form a governing coalition.”

Haaretz contributor Ari Shavit highlighted “The dramatic headline of this election: Israel is not right wing.”

He’s Haaretz’s resident hawk. He claims King Bibi’s reign ended. He’ll remain prime minister but won’t rule. “His life will not be easy, not politically and not in terms of policy.”

Israel is more centrist, says Shavit. Imagine calling a dog a cat. Israel is more rightwing than ever. Election results left no doubt.

Haaretz’s Chemi Shalev said they showed voters “elected a government that is bound to be more centrist, more moderate, more secular, more pluralistic and more inclusive than its predecessor or any of the alternatives that seemed plausible just a few short days ago.”

Hardline fascist rule is policy. Worse than ever times loom. Events eventually awaken people to reality. Perhaps Israelis will realize they’ve been had. It bears repeating. They’ve got themselves to blame.

A Final Comment

Alan Dershowitz is a notorious bigot. He’s a longstanding Islamophobe. He believes in unique Jewish suffering. He’s mindless of all others.

He’s a committed Zionist and Israeli apologist. He legitimizes its crimes of war, against humanity and genocide. He believes waging war achieves peace.

He advocates torture and targeted assassinations. Francis Boyle once called him an “infamous self-incriminating war criminal.”

He “publicly acknowledged being a member of a Mossad Committee for approving the murder and assassination of Palestinians, which violates the Geneva Conventions and is thus a grave war crime.”

He’s “unfit” to educate aspiring lawyers. He got prominent Haaretz op-ed space. He turned truth on its head. He said election results shifted Israeli politics “toward the center and away from the extremes.”

It’s more likely to “have more flexibility in dealing with the Palestinian Authority and in moving toward a two-state solution.”

Two states were once possible. No longer. Israel controls over half the West Bank and much of East Jerusalem. More is added daily. Peaceful resolution requires one state for all its people. Nothing else works.

Dershowitz is hardline. He believes only Jewish rights matter. He wants Palestinians marginalized and denied. He favors accelerated settlement construction.

Resume peace talks, he says. Tolerate no preconditions. He blames Palestinians for Israeli crimes.

He claims Netanyahu “very much wants to be the person who brings about peace….” He spuriously calls Iran an existential threat.

He says Israel reflects real democracy. Its “people and (their) leaders (will) prove to the world that (they) know (their) own best interests and (are) in the best position to implement them.”

“That is what democracy is all about, and Israel’s recent elections display democracy at its best.”

He teaches this stuff to law students. His pedagogy subverts truth. He’s best avoided. He’s part of Harvard Law’s school for torturers. 

Don’t send your children there, urges Francis Boyle. Dershowitz, other notorious faculty members, and deans “are no longer fit to educate lawyers. They are a sick joke and a demented fraud.”

“Harvard is to Law School as Torture is to Law.” It’s a “Neo-Con cesspool.” Dershowitz’s presence bears much responsibility. He gives higher education a bad name. Avoid him at all costs.
 

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  
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