Hollybaere
06-14-2002, 09:26 PM
Dear participants of this board,
In the following I will try to shed some light on The Middle East Conflict.
Years of distortion of the historical events in the conflict over Palestine and how biased the American media has reported on those events, have brought me to the conclusion, that without an educated, neutral inside view a broader American public will be deliberately kept in the dark until it is too late!
In a series of clarifying articles I will try to spark awareness of the actual ongoings and how, but foremost why the true happenings are being kept from the American taxpayer.
And again, it is my honest intention, not to confuse, but much more offer an alternative view to a highly single sided American journalism.
I would like to start my hopefully enlightening series with a basic view of the historical facts of the region of Palestine.
I hope you enjoy my postings and learn something from them, something to think and pass on to others.
My Kindest Regards to all members of this board.
_________________________________________
History of Palestine Part One
Palestine has always constituted a single geographical, political and demographic unit with Greater Syria and Egypt. On its soil the civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt intermingled. Palestine also witnessed, as a land bridge linking Asia, Africa, and Europe, several movements and waves of conquerors who dominated it for different periods of time and left behind varying degrees of influence. The indigenous population, however, always managed to defeat the conquerors and regain its freedom.
The Arab character was the main, if not the only one to persist. It survived within the context of a particular cultural, linguistic and historical civilization as well as in social customs. The inhabitants of this geographical area known as "Palestine," through their continuous existence on this land, have kept certain cultural characteristics which, together with their very existence on that land, have never been threatened throughout history as they are threatened now by Zionism.
Palestine witnessed several colonial invasions. These took various forms to hide imperialist intentions based on economic and strategic interests, chief among which was religion exemplified by the Crusades. Thus came the international colonialist movement in the late nineteenth century which, in order to solve the "Oriental Problem," aimed at cutting up and dividing the Ottoman Empire among the world's imperialist powers. The British, French and German secret services worked eagerly to advance their own imperialist interests by encouraging Jews living in their own communities to return to the so-called "promised land," Palestine. Due to its geographical importance, controlling Palestine gave control over the heart of the Arab World and was the cross-roads of both the Old and New Worlds.
This explains the motives behind Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt and Syria at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the struggle between Britain, France and Germany to get the lion's share of the sick man of Europe, the Ottoman Empire. The fact that the onset of serious Jewish settlement in Palestine in 1882 coincided with the occupation of Egypt by Britain and of Tunisia by France in the same year, points out the cooperation and link between the Zionist colonial settlement and the international colonialist movement. Furthermore, the establishment of a Jewish homeland would sever the link, and break the unity of the body of the Arab World in Africa with Arabs in Asia, due to this homeland's position at the heart of the Afro-Asian land. This also enables the Zionist base to direct the struggle against Arab liberation movements and achieve control over international communication routes and the resources of the region.
The area of Palestine is a mere 26,326 square kilometers, of which 48% is desert and 30.9% a very steep mountainous area. Consequently, this cannot economically be the motive for Jewish settlement, but rather could form a good basis for starting out and then expanding all around like a military outpost on which imperialism could forever depend; it would assume the role of policeman in the area, hitting Arab national movements hard, eradicating them, and subjugating the Arab countries to the military, economic and political control of Israel and imperialism.
This imperialist role is given more credence by the fact that the leaders of the Zionist movement first thought of settling in areas such as Argentina, Cyprus , the Sinai Peninsula, Uganda, the Arabian Gulf and Libya, before finally deciding on Palestine, which belies the pretence that Zionism is a national liberation movement for Jews. It is inconceivable for a true national and popular liberation movement not to have a previously established link with a well known and defined homeland.
Israel, as Herzel hailed it in his book "Old Land-New Land," extends to the Euphrates and includes Beirut and the Lebanese mountains. In a document published in 1917 by the Youth Movement of the American Zionist Organization, to which a map was attached and which was designed to introduce Israel, is stated: "There in our own land, we the Hebrews of long standing and you the Hebrews to come, will untidily lay our hands on every spot that once belonged to us: from Sidon to Sukkoth, from Tadmor to Ur-Kasdim, from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, from the mighty Euphrates to the far-stretching desert..."(1)
Ben Gurion further confirmed in the 17th Zionist Congress the plans for the expansion of Zionist imperialism, for he said,
"in Eastern Palestine, there are broader and emptier acres, and Jordan is not necessarily the perpetual limit to our immigration and settlement... without amending the Mandate we are entitled to ask the right to enter and settle Transjordan; its closure in our faces neither accords with the Mandate as it stands, nor considers the crying economic need of a fertile but under-populated and impecunious region." (2)
Emanating from these same imperialist and expansionst ideas, Ben Gurion demanded in a 1954 meeting that included Moshe Sharett and Moshe Dayan, that everything be done to establish a Maronite State in Lebanon, at the initiative and with the military, political and financial assistance of Israel. Moshe Sharett writes in his diary about a meeting, late in the same year, of the senior employees of the Israeli Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense, where Ben Gurion reiterated his demand that his plans for Lebanon be implemented, and where Moshe Dayan very enthusiastically declared: "The only thing that's necessary is to find a Lebanese officer, even just a major. We should either win his heart or buy him with money to make him agree to declare himself the savior of the Marionette population. Then the Israeli army will enter Lebanon, will occupy the necessary territory and will create a Christian regime which will ally itself with Israel ... and everything will be all right."(3)
For this purpose Zionist plans foresaw the necessity of igniting a civil war in Lebanon and creating a situation of tension. In a letter from Ben Gurion to Moshe Sharett, dated February 27, 1954, he wrote on the one hand: "in normal times this (the creation of a Maronite state) would be almost impossible ... But at times of confusion, or revolution or civil war, things take on another aspect and even the weak declares himself to be a hero."(4)
On the other hand, the main principles of the Herut Party, which Menachim Begin heads, go beyond Ben Gurion's point of view, which foresees the annexation of "East Palestine" (the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan) and calls for its liberation by military force. (5) This was confirmed further by the Herut Party Conference. The declarations of Ariel Sharon, the former Minister of Defense in the Likud government (1982) which call for the establishment of a Palestinian state at the expense of the people, the land and the independence of Jordan (pretending all the time that he is relinquishing a part of the land of Israel as the only solution to the Palestine question) are nothing more than an integral part of Zionist expansionist plans. It is to be expected, therefore, in accordance with these plans, that the 1980's might witness movements in this direction.
It seems that Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, had elaborated a policy for the expansion of the Zionist colonial settlements in the early 1950s, in order to develop the Zionist military outpost, Israel, into a regional power capable of carrying out operations in the service of imperialism. In 1953 he put forward a draft plan for the occupation of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula, just before Gamal Abdel Nasser took over in Egypt. The invasion was to take place in 1953. On October 26, 1953, Matti Peled, a member of the Israeli secret service, summarized the attitude of the Zionist movement towards the West Bank in front of the Zionist movement in the United States, saying: "One, that the Army considers the present border with Jordan as absolutely unacceptable. Two, that the Army is planning war in order to occupy the rest of Western Eretz Israel. At that time, the Zionist leadership snubbed all Arab efforts to reach a peaceful settlement through direct negotiations. Nahum Goldmann, who headed the World Jewish Congress for more than 30 years, recalls that Ben Gurion refused to negotiate with the Arabs to prevent the 1948 war, and accused his foreign minister Moshe Sharett, who tried to persuade him to reach a peaceful settlement through negotiations, of being against the establishment and declaration of the state of Israel. Moshe Dayan also turned down all attempts by the Egyptian and Jordanian administrations in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, respectively, aiming at the elaboration of security arrangements to prevent infiltration, claiming that such an arrangement would "...hamper the movement of Israel," in launching reprisal operations.(6) These operations aimed at the humiliation of Arab governments, the exile of the Palestinians and the imposition of Israel's hegemony and might over the whole area, thus proving to the imperialist powers the effectiveness of this military outpost in keeping the Arabs in place.
Imperialist Collaboration with Zionism 1917-1948
The conspiracy, woven consecutively by the three imperialist powers, Great Britain, France and the USA, and which they hid under the mantle of the tripartite declaration of 1951, and their financial, military and economic support, claiming their moral commitment to the Jews and Israel only proves the reality of the link between Israel and these imperialist powers through common aims and interests. This link, forever renewable through illegitimate interests, goes back to 1840, when oil was being discovered, the consuls and ambassadors of Western countries in Jerusalem and Constantinople singled out the Jews among other Ottoman citizens and placed them under their protection. (7) Herzl succeeded in obtaining a guarantee of support from the German Empire in 1898. He wrote in his diaries: "To live under the protection of strong, great, moral, splendidly governed and thoroughly organized Germany is certain to have most salutary effects on the national character of the Jews."(8)
After the German-Ottoman alliance and the refusal by Germany to adopt the Zionist settlement plan, Herzel's interest turned towards British imperialism. In a letter he addressed to Baron de Rothschild, he wrote: "So far, you still have elbow room. May you claim high credit from your government if you strengthen British influences in the Near East by a substantial colonization of our people at the strategic point where Egyptian and Indo-Persian interests converge..."(9)
After Chaim Weizmann took over the Zionist movement in Britain, he wrote a letter to C.P. Scott, Editor-in-Chief of the Manchester Guardian, in November 1914, in which he says "We can reasonably say that should Palestine fall within our sphere of influence and should Britain encourage Jewish settlement there, as a British dependency, we could have in twenty to thirty years a million Jews out there, perhaps more; they would develop the country, bring back civilization to it, and form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal."(10)
Herbert Samuel, the British Zionist who later became first British High Commissioner in Palestine, scored a success for the Zionist movement within the British Government. He presented a memorandum to the government in 1914 proposing the creation of a Jewish state. With the help of Great Britain and the USA, he then requested the British government (which had not yet occupied Palestine) to give the Jewish organizations all the facilities required to set up settlements, establish educational and religious institutions, and to open the doors of Palestine to Jewish immigration so that... in the course of time the Jewish inhabitants grew into a majority and settled in the land... the course which is advocated would win for England the gratitude of the Jews, throughout the world. In the United States, where they number about 2,000,000 and in all the other lands where they are scattered they would form a body of opinion [that] would be favorable to the British Empire."(11)
When Arthur Balfour became Britain's Foreign Minister, the Zionist movement scored another success, due not solely to his deep relationship with this movement, but also to the fact of his being one of the architects of European colonialism in Southern Africa. Balfour furthermore managed to do away with the part of the Sykes-Picot Agreement which called for the internationalization of Palestine, in view of committing Britain to agreeing that Jewish settlements be a preliminary fact to the creation of a Jewish state. (12)
The letter which Woodrow Wilson, the president of the USA, addressed to Lloyd George, the British prime minister was the main factor in dispelling any hesitation the British Government might have had regarding its commitment to the creation of a Jewish state. Immediately after the receipt of this letter, Balfour announced his declaration on November, 1917.
Transformation of Land Ownership
American money thus started pouring in to save Jewish settlements from actually suffocating in their cradle. The Zionist leadership succeeded in amassing $10 million from official and public sources in order to finance its plans. It appealed to the supportive Mandatory government, quoting Article 2 of the Mandate law which states: "...That the Mandatory government be responsible for providing the country with the appropriate economic, political and administrative conditions, that would guarantee the creation of a Jewish national homeland," and Article 6 of the same law which reads: "...it is up to the administration in Palestine to encourage, with the cooperation of the Jewish Agency, the gathering of the Jews on government owned lands mentioned in the Article requested for public use." Furthermore, in 1921, the Mandatory government altered the Ottoman law which allowed any citizen to reclaim any land and register it officially in his name without prior permission. The amendment necessitated obtaining previous permission from the Director of Lands, who naturally was a Zionist, with the aim of limiting the exploitation of uncultivated lands by Palestinians and restricting land registration to the Zionist movement. The Mandatory authority issued in 1926 "The Seizure of Land Law" with the intention of seizing Palestinian lands under the pretext of establishing economic projects. Two years later it issued the "Settlement of Land Ownership Rights Law" through which the Mandate authorities were able to seize lands that belonged to Arab tribes and families and hand them over to the Zionist movement. British Zionists who were appointed in the Mandatory government received their orders from the Jewish Agency and implemented these laws. The British went on to hand over entire villages (such as Bar das Hanna in the Haifa region) in accordance with the terror, of the Palestine constitution amended in 1932. It also promulgated the "Forests Law," according to which tens of thousands of dunums of thick forest lands registered in their Palestinian owners' names were expropriated.(13)
In order to serve their aims, the constitution of the Jewish Agency of 1929 stated in its Article 3:
"Land is to be acquired as Jewish property... the title to the lands acquired is to be taken in the name of the Jewish National Fund, to the end that the same shall be held as the inalienable property of the Jewish people. The Agency shall promote agricultural colonization based on Jewish labor... it shall be deemed to a matter of principle that Jewish labor shall employed..." (14)
In addition to this policy, which even prevented Palestinian peasants from working on the land where they once worked for absentee landlords, the land expert who represented the Jewish Agency at the Shaw Committee in 1929 insisted that 90% of the lands bought up to that date belonged to non-Palestinian absentee owners. (15)
The Mandatory government then went ahead with the implementation of laws which would secure the establishment of a Jewish state. It thus allocated illegally to the Jewish Agency 195,000 dunums of state owned lands and gave the control of most concessionary companies, such as the Palestinian Electricity Company, the Salt Company and the Potash Company to Jewish immigrants. "The joint total capital of these companies accounts for 90% of the total capital of all concessionary companies."(16) This policy had dangerous consequences, for it appeared in 1930 that of the 86,980 Palestinian peasant families, 29.40% owned no lands. (17) The theft of the national heritage, led to the exacerbation of misery, suffering and unemployment, all of which are part of a plan aiming at pushing the Palestinians to emigrate. In his memoirs, Joseph Weitz, who headed the management board of the Jewish National Fund from 1951 to 1972, wrote: "Among ourselves it should be clear that the is no room in this country for the two peoples together." (18) He then advocates that the Palestinians be exiled to neighboring countries.
At the end of 1946, the British authorities estimated Jewish land property to be 81,624,000 dunums, or approximately 6% of the total land area.(19) This means that when the State of Israel was declared, 94% of the total area of Palestine was owned by Palestinians. Palestinian farmers were able to preserve their land--against the odds--from transfer to Zionist colonies.
Collective Expulsion
As regards the population, the General Monthly Review, which the Mandate government published, estimated in its March 31, 1947 issue that the Arab, non-Jewish inhabitants numbered 1,400,000, while the Jews numbered 589,341. This clearly proves that an absolute Arab majority prevailed in Palestine on the eve of the declaration of the State of Israel. The Zionist movement succeeded in increasing the number of settlers from 24,000 in 1882 to 589,341 in 1947, or from 5% to approximately 42% of the total population, thanks to the help and policies of the Mandate government which had as a task the creation of such a majority. This majority, however, had not been achieved when the State of Israel at last became a reality. It was then clear to the Zionist leadership when Britain decided to withdraw, that establishing a state in Palestine as Jewish as England is English could not be achieved as long as a dominant Palestinian majority population owned the majority of the lands of their future state.
Palestine
The Zionist leadership then doubled its efforts to draw up sinister plans to insure that its colonial expansionist state was created, especially after Britain abandoned the policy it declared in December 1947 advocating the gradual transfer of authority to two provisional, governments, one Palestinian and the other Jewish, according to the partition plan, in favor of a resolution prolonging the period of its mandate over the whole of Palestine till the 15th of May 1948. This new policy was intended to protect the borders of Palestine against any eventual Arab intervention until the Zionist leadership had completed the mobilization of its human and military resources. Furthermore, being a country with imperialist interests, Great Britain aimed at introducing into Palestine a technologically advanced minority of settlers mobilized by a fanatic and highly organized movement. The British also closed their eyes to the secret arming and training undertaken by the settlers, while they brought all their might to bear on preventing the indigenous majority from arming itself, and proceeded to destroy its political leadership.(20) They gave the Zionist gangs unlimited access to their military arsenal and supplied them with firsthand information on their withdrawal plans.
When the time came for the British forces to withdraw, the Zionist leadership had completed the plans it had been working on for more than 80 years. Yigal Yadin, who headed the Haganah Operations, says that the strategic plan was by then ready and contained illustrated details of every Palestinian village and its inhabitants. (21)
The first phase of this strategy was plan "C." It started before the month of March and saw to it that Zionist areas would not fall into Palestinian hands, and that all communication routes were adequately protected. The part of this plan that concerned the Palestinians foresaw a dirty psychological warfare campaign (the Palestinian population was ordered to take cholera and typhus vaccines, as these epidemics, they said, might spread in March and April).(22) It also foresaw raids against peaceful villages where explosive devises were placed around stone houses, petrol-poured over wooden windows and door frames and then lit, and their inhabitants burned to death inside.(23) On March 9, 1948, the Deir Yassin Massacre took place; it preceded the second phase of the operation, Phase "D" which constituted, in effect zero hour, and which started immediately after the British forces withdrew. These operations had the secret code name "Matateh" (the Broom) and foresaw the use of the burned land policy. According to this plan, Zionist gangs blew up and destroyed 473 Palestinian villages and cities after committing massacres against their population, women, old people and children. They often gathered the men in the village mosque and blew it up on them; some were allowed to watch the operation and then allowed to go in order to inform other Palestinian communities of what was going on. At the same time loudspeakers in the streets carried recorded sounds of fear and women's lamentation and then a voice would be heard, as if from the grave, asking people to emigrate: "All you believers, save your souls, escape and save your life, the Jews are using poisoned gas and nuclear weapons. Have pity on your women and children and set out of this bloodbath, for if you stay you would have brought disaster upon yourselves."(24)
Zionist Colonization 1948-1967
In its aggressive war in 1948, Israel occupied an estimated 20,700 square km. comprising nine whole administrative districts and five sub-districts, out of a total of 18 districts inhabited by a majority Palestinian population of approximately 904,000 people, (25) while the number of Jews in Palestine at the time was a mere 589,341 people. (26) After the completion of the Zionist plan, this Palestinian majority dropped to approximately 120,000 to 130,000 people. This resulted in operations of population substitution and expansion of territory unprecedented in history.
Alec Kirkbride, one of the senior architects of British policy in the Middle East recorded in his book his knowledge of a plan to evict the Palestinian population to Transjordan: "... which was (Transjordan) intended to serve as a reserve of land for use in the resettlement of Arabs once the National Home for the Jews in Palestine which they were pledged to support, became an accomplished fact.(27)
The "Jewish Chronicle" published on August 13, 1947 a detailed report, unchallenged by any Zionist quarter, about the secret talks that took place between Chaim Weizman and the British Minister of Colonies. The former requested that the "Arab population be transferred" out of Palestine in order to implement the partition plan suggested by Britain the same year.
The Zionist movement paved the way for these evictions and expulsion in the international arena by issuing resolutions calling openly and frankly for the eviction of the Palestinians from their country. Thus the British Labour Party passed a resolution in 1944 to encourage the Arabs "to leave Palestine" while Jews would be encouraged to go there. This was preceded by the Baltimore Conference of 1942 which brought together representatives of both the Republican and Democratic Parties and recommended steps to a similar effect. As soon as the State obtained legal international recognition, the Israeli authorities spared no effort to liquidate the Palestinian minority which Ben Gal, Commander of the Northern Region considered a cancer in the body of the State. (28)
This Palestinian minority was subject to the British emergency rules and regulations of 1945, reissued by the Israeli Defence Minister in 1949 under the pretext of security--Israel's "sacred cow"--which it used, as did other fascist regimes, to carry out its racial terror policy. These rules, for example, give the Israeli military officer the right to enact and execute any laws and policies he deems necessary without giving the Palestinians the right to appeal against them. These involve administrative detention, exile, expropriation and destruction of property, the imposition of individual and collective fines, the banning of free speech and publication, the imposition of house arrests, and defining "security" or "closed zones" where entry to and exit from are strictly prohibited.
The lawyer Yacoub Samson Shapira, who later became legal adviser to the Israeli Government, or prosecutor general, described the laws upon their imposition by the British Government as follows:
"The rule that was established after the publication of the emergency regulations in Palestine has no equivalent anywhere else in the civilized world. Even Nazi Germany had no such laws passed even at the service of Nazism and the like."(29) Thus, armed with these arbitrary laws and operating in the shadow of a racialist military rule that lasted 16 years, from 1949 to 1966, Israel proceeded during this period to assemble the Palestinians in certain villages and considered them "security" or closed zones, ghettoes or Bantustans, out of which the population could not circulate.
In the best South African racialist government style, whole areas stretching for tens of kilometers were considered security zones; the same applied to the Galilee and Triangle areas in the heart of Israel, and the area adjacent to the Gaza Strip and the fourth area, on the Jaffa-Jerusalem Railroad near the village of Batteer.(30) At the same time, hurried mass expulsions were taking place without interruption. On the 4th of February 1949, for example, the Israeli authorities evicted half the inhabitants of the village of Kufr 'Anan and forced them across the Jordanian border. On December 25, 1951, Christmas Day, they blew up the village of Iqrit and evicted its Christian Maronite inhabitants after handing them a notice to vacate their houses in only two weeks. The Israeli authorities then proceeded to confiscate their land estimated at 15,650 dunums. On September 16, 1953, the Israeli Infantry and Air Force attacked the village of Kufr Bar'am and destroyed it completely. After that the whole village area amounting 11,700 dunums, were confiscated.(31) On February 28, seven hundred people were expelled from the village of Kufr Yasseef, and forcibly loaded on trucks and then made to cross the Jordan River. On August 17, 1950, the ten thousand inhabitants of Al-Majdal, a Palestinian textile manufacturing center were also deported.(32) This mass expulsion operation lasted for three weeks.
In October the Bagara tribe was forced to cross over into Syria. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz published in its November 3, 1953, and November 1959 issues accounts of some of the expulsion operations involving Palestinian bedouins, carried out by Unit 101 of the Israeli Army, which was headed by the former Israeli Defence Minister, Ariel Sharon during the 1953-1954 period. These operations resulted in the expulsion of a big part of the Azazmeh tribe who were forced to go to the Sinai Desert. Bedouin groups saw Israeli desert vehicles appear in their midst day after day. (33)
"Cannons and automatic weapons were sudden and crippling until finally the children of the desert were destroyed. They gathered their few remaining possessions and led their camels in long silent processions into the heart of the Sinai Desert."
The forcible eviction of these bedouins went on, reaching five different evictions in one year for some tribes. (34) After failing to dislodge the Sawa'ed tribe from their land, the Israelis proceeded to tighten their grip on them. They withdrew their hunting and travel licenses, closed their elementary schools, forbade food supplies from reaching them and prevented them selling their produce outside their area. (35) On September 27, 1950, forty-five houses and all water wells belonging to the Na'im tribe near Shafa 'Amr were destroyed in order to force the population to leave their lands. (36)
In 1950, the Knesset took a decision to turn the "Committee for Arab Rural Property" of 1948 into the "Committee for the Property of Absentees" and appointed a custodian who was considered according to the same Knesset decision the legal owner of all lands and property owned by expelled Palestinians. The custodian was allowed to sell the property only to the "building and development authority" which in turn gave it to the Jewish National Fund, thus becoming the eternal property of the Jewish people, not liable for sale or any other transaction and banning all others, but Jews, from renting or working them.
On the 26th of June 1953, an agreement was signed between the government, the "building and development authority" and the Jewish National Fund (a thief with three faces), to "sell" an estimated 2,373,677 dunums of Palestinian absentee lands to the Fund. Some 15,025,000 dunums were later transferred to it after duly channeling them through other Zionist institutions in order to guarantee the "legality" of the property transfer operation. These lands, and those already owned by the National Fund, were later called "the lands of the nation." Furthermore, and in order to tighten the grip on the Palestinian minority who resisted against the organized massacres, successive Israeli governments issued successive laws with the aim of stealing as much of the land belonging to that minority as possible, thus taking away their means of daily life and existence. In addition to the laws setting up security and closed zones, a new law was issued legalizing the use of abandoned lands and another law "for the requisitions of land in times of emergency 1949." Some of these lands were used to accommodate the new Jewish emigrants on Palestinian lands and in their cities, while others were used to house government institutions. Another new law concerned with the property of "absentee present owners," which considered as absentees thousands of present Palestinians who were supposed to be Israeli citizens. The Israeli authorities must have considered "God an Absentee" when they handed over the property of the Islamic waqf to the custodian of absentee property, who in his turn sold most of this property, including the Moslem cemeteries and some mosques to the Zionist "building and development authority." These lands were estimated to range between 750,000 and 1,100,000 dunums. (37)
Judaization of the Galilee
Last but not least of the laws to mention is the land seizure law "the law for the acquisition of land (operations and compensation) 1953-1954" which epitomizes all other laws involving confiscation. It also legalizes all seizures that occurred during and after the war by giving the Israeli finance minister full powers to transfer the ownership of seized lands to the Israeli government, in addition to giving him the right to expropriate and seize any piece of land without giving the owners of these lands the right to appeal. This law was compared to the laws promulgated in Spain in the middle ages to seize the property of Jews, or to those of the Nazis in more recent times. (38) The Israeli authorities proceeded according to these laws in 1953-1954 to expropriate 1,225,174 dunums in 291 Palestinian villages (39) and 65% of the lands of 78 (out of 104) other villages.(40) Samuel Toledano, who was then adviser to the prime minister on Arab affairs, declared that the law involved as well the seizure of two million dunums of land belonging to the Nagab bedouins.(41) The battle over these lands incidentally, is still going on until today.
The massacre of Kufr Kassem in 1956 and the harassment of many other Palestinian villages failed to push the Palestinians to emigrate. Thus a new wave of settlements started in the sixties under the slogan "Judaization of the Galilee." To avoid the racial connotation the slogan was officially changed to "development of Galilee." This wave, which is still going on today, aims at depriving the inhabitants of Palestinian cities and villages of their means of livelihood and at tightening the grip on them in order to limit their natural growth and development. Nazareth, capital of west Galilee, was the first victim of this wave for around it there were in 1953 some 51 Arab villages with a population of 84,000 persons, owning 929,549 dunums of land. (42) Between the years 1951-1976, Israel established 250 settlements as part of the 3rd phase of settlements. (43)
Naturally those settlements were built on lands seized from Palestinians and others belonging to the cities and villages remaining after the 1948 war. In spite of all that, the situation of the Palestinians and the natural growth in their numbers increased the worry of the Zionist leaders. Israel Koenig, governor of the northern province (which includes Acre, Nazareth, Tiberias and Safad where the majority of Palestinians live), presented a plan to the Israeli ministry of the interior asking it to pursue a clearly defined and basically racial policy to combat the Palestinian demographic "danger" which threatens the purity of Israel. In his document he writes that the national growth rate of the Arab inhabitants of Israel is approximately 5.9% per annum, while that of the Jewish inhabitants is 1.5% per annum. This problem, he says, is acute, especially in the northern province which includes a large number of the "Arab minority." By mid-1975 the number of these inhabitants in the northern district was approximately 250 thousand persons, while the number of Jews was approximately 289 thousand persons. He adds that if one looks at the various districts, he will see that in eastern Galilee the Arabs constitute 67% of the population, and in "Yisrael" province (Nazareth) they constitute approximately 48% of the population. Koenig indicates that in 1974 the number of Jews grew in the northern province by 759 persons, while the number of Arabs grew by 9,025 persons. According to this ratio of growth, the percentage of Arab inhabitants in the northern district will reach over 51% in 1978. (44)
In the light of these "dangers," which are based on racial perceptions, Koenig suggests to the Israeli government a series of measures aiming at decreasing the number of Arab citizens and increasing the number of Jews. He suggests that obstacles be created to prevent Palestinian students from joining higher educational institutions; instead, they should be encouraged to go abroad and then prevented from returning home. He advises the impoverishment of the Palestinians by barring them from working in factories, imposing high taxes and forbidding them from operating as marketing agents, in addition to strengthening the effectiveness of the police force in Arab areas. Although this racist document was not officially adopted by the Israeli government, the measures and policies practiced by successive Israeli governments are similar to what it suggests.
Furthermore, Palestinian town councils are suffocating from racial discrimination through heavy cuts in their development budgets and other sources of income. Maps of city master plans are not authorized to freeze development of Palestinian cities and towns and to prevent the citizens from building. Even the diminished budgets of the local councils are approved only after half the financial year has elapsed in order to paralyze their work and prevent them from providing the citizens with daily services. (45)
The Zionist Settler Colonization of the West Bank and Gaza Strip 1967-1977
The war of 1967 left the doors wide open for Zionist settlement construction, and the experience that the Israeli authorities gained in stealing and expropriating land since the creation of their state helped them to accelerate the expansion process. The Ma'arakh coalition set forth in 1967 to implement the Greater Israel ideal as embodied in the Alion plan. The plan considers 40% of the West Bank as territory falling within Israel's expansionist settlement projects. It includes the annexation of the Gaza Strip and considers the Jordan Valley an inseparable part of Israel.
Ariel Sharon conducted an experimental eviction operation when he was Military Commander in the Gaza Strip and Moshe Dayan was Minister of Defense. Through this settlement wave, the party in power hoped to bring together the plan of Allon, on the one hand, and those of Dayan, Yisrael Galili and Sharon which embody all the ambitions of the annexation and expansion fanatics, on the other. Another typical development of the period was the appearance of the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) whose members believe that Messianic salvation resides in the return of the land of Israel. This racist movement was behind the conditions set by the religious groups, namely not to withdraw from the occupied territories except after general elections are held in return for their participation in the Ma'arakh coalition in 1974. The Labour Party agreed to these conditions, thus putting themselves indirectly on the same footing as the Likud coalition.
A ministerial committee representing the Ministries of Absorption and Emigration, Housing, Defense, Trade and Industry, Agriculture and the Interior was formed in 1972 to organize and plan the relocation of 5 million Israelis in the next 20 years, 1972-1992. (46) This project, according to the president of the Committee (Eliezer Brotzkus), involves the territories occupied in 1967. He wrote in an article that 63,000 persons would settle in the occupied territories in the period covered by the project (except for Jerusalem, which the writer considers to be part of Israel). These form only 1 % of the 5 million due to be reallocated.(47) The Jewish Agency, moreover, plans to settle some 100 to 130 thousand persons during the four coming years, and 1,300,000 in the coming 30 years, according to a study on land acquisition and the development of Arab inhabitants. (48)
The Israeli Labour Party and the Ma'arakh government directed their efforts quickly and comprehensively towards Palestinian Jerusalem immediately after it was occupied and annexed on June 28, 1967. A belt of high fortified buildings was erected around the city, and Arab quarters within it were torn down in their entirety to build new quarters for Jewish settlers. Plans were drawn for the construction of more such belts in the form of built-up hilltops encircling the city of Jerusalem. The main strategic purpose of these plans is the isolation, of Jerusalem, "their eternal capital," from the rest of the West Bank, thus making its inclusion in any future peaceful settlement virtually impossible. The second strategic aim is to stop Palestinian natural expansion and growth on their own lands which Israel expropriated to build these settlement belts. Finally, the Palestinian citizens were confined as a result to ghettoes designed to make them even more depressed and incapable of going on, thus paving the way for their expulsion.
Therefore, the settlement effort of the Labour Party and the Ma'arakh were directed towards the Jordan Valley and the adjoining heights along the eastern border. This took the form of two belts, one composed of agricultural settlements on the Jordan River plain and stretching from south of the Dead Sea to the limits of the West Bank in the north where it meets the 1948 Israeli border. Work on this belt came to an almost total halt during the war of attrition waged from the East Bank, and settlement construction shifted to the Syrian Golan till the eve of the seventies.
The second belt was composed of industrial and agricultural settlements stretching along the mountains overlooking the Jordan Valley, starting in the south at the meeting point with the Jerusalem Jericho road, and going northwards to meet the first belt on the northern borders of Israel and the West Bank.
A third belt was also constructed to cover the projects of Allon, Dayan and Galili and involves the regions of Hebron, the settlement belt of Tulkarm and Qalqilya and the axis of the three villages, entirely destroyed a few days after the 1967 war: (Amwas, Yalo and Beit Nuba).
The strategic aims of these settlement belts can be summarized as follows:
The geographical and permanent isolation and separation of Palestine from the rest of the Arab World to the East, and the severing of all geographical links between the Palestinians and the rest of the Arabs.
The encirclement of the Palestinian inhabitants from all sides, thus halting their expansion and confining them to ghettos similar to the South African Bantustans. (49)
To exploit the land and the natural and human resources of the territories including their water, in favor of the Zionist settlers, and to turn those territories into a captive market for Israeli goods and prevent their economic development by encouraging their Palestinian inhabitants to emigrate. The settlement strategy of the Labour Party reflects its understanding of a peaceful settlement. It involves ceding to Jordan (the Jordanian option) the administration of the affairs of the Palestinian citizens in the West Bank, but not of the territory. It refuses to cede its sovereignty on any part of the "Land of Israel" for it considers the Jordan Valley, the heights of Arab Jerusalem, the collection of settlements on the way to Beit Ummar and Hebron and the plains around Qalqilya, Tulkarm and Latroun an indivisible part of Israel.
The years during which the Ma'arakh alignment was in power, in particular the second half of 1975, saw an expansionist leap bigger than any since 1967. The settlement sites, except for Jerusalem, increased from 53 to 77 sites. (50)
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In the following I will try to shed some light on The Middle East Conflict.
Years of distortion of the historical events in the conflict over Palestine and how biased the American media has reported on those events, have brought me to the conclusion, that without an educated, neutral inside view a broader American public will be deliberately kept in the dark until it is too late!
In a series of clarifying articles I will try to spark awareness of the actual ongoings and how, but foremost why the true happenings are being kept from the American taxpayer.
And again, it is my honest intention, not to confuse, but much more offer an alternative view to a highly single sided American journalism.
I would like to start my hopefully enlightening series with a basic view of the historical facts of the region of Palestine.
I hope you enjoy my postings and learn something from them, something to think and pass on to others.
My Kindest Regards to all members of this board.
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History of Palestine Part One
Palestine has always constituted a single geographical, political and demographic unit with Greater Syria and Egypt. On its soil the civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt intermingled. Palestine also witnessed, as a land bridge linking Asia, Africa, and Europe, several movements and waves of conquerors who dominated it for different periods of time and left behind varying degrees of influence. The indigenous population, however, always managed to defeat the conquerors and regain its freedom.
The Arab character was the main, if not the only one to persist. It survived within the context of a particular cultural, linguistic and historical civilization as well as in social customs. The inhabitants of this geographical area known as "Palestine," through their continuous existence on this land, have kept certain cultural characteristics which, together with their very existence on that land, have never been threatened throughout history as they are threatened now by Zionism.
Palestine witnessed several colonial invasions. These took various forms to hide imperialist intentions based on economic and strategic interests, chief among which was religion exemplified by the Crusades. Thus came the international colonialist movement in the late nineteenth century which, in order to solve the "Oriental Problem," aimed at cutting up and dividing the Ottoman Empire among the world's imperialist powers. The British, French and German secret services worked eagerly to advance their own imperialist interests by encouraging Jews living in their own communities to return to the so-called "promised land," Palestine. Due to its geographical importance, controlling Palestine gave control over the heart of the Arab World and was the cross-roads of both the Old and New Worlds.
This explains the motives behind Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt and Syria at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the struggle between Britain, France and Germany to get the lion's share of the sick man of Europe, the Ottoman Empire. The fact that the onset of serious Jewish settlement in Palestine in 1882 coincided with the occupation of Egypt by Britain and of Tunisia by France in the same year, points out the cooperation and link between the Zionist colonial settlement and the international colonialist movement. Furthermore, the establishment of a Jewish homeland would sever the link, and break the unity of the body of the Arab World in Africa with Arabs in Asia, due to this homeland's position at the heart of the Afro-Asian land. This also enables the Zionist base to direct the struggle against Arab liberation movements and achieve control over international communication routes and the resources of the region.
The area of Palestine is a mere 26,326 square kilometers, of which 48% is desert and 30.9% a very steep mountainous area. Consequently, this cannot economically be the motive for Jewish settlement, but rather could form a good basis for starting out and then expanding all around like a military outpost on which imperialism could forever depend; it would assume the role of policeman in the area, hitting Arab national movements hard, eradicating them, and subjugating the Arab countries to the military, economic and political control of Israel and imperialism.
This imperialist role is given more credence by the fact that the leaders of the Zionist movement first thought of settling in areas such as Argentina, Cyprus , the Sinai Peninsula, Uganda, the Arabian Gulf and Libya, before finally deciding on Palestine, which belies the pretence that Zionism is a national liberation movement for Jews. It is inconceivable for a true national and popular liberation movement not to have a previously established link with a well known and defined homeland.
Israel, as Herzel hailed it in his book "Old Land-New Land," extends to the Euphrates and includes Beirut and the Lebanese mountains. In a document published in 1917 by the Youth Movement of the American Zionist Organization, to which a map was attached and which was designed to introduce Israel, is stated: "There in our own land, we the Hebrews of long standing and you the Hebrews to come, will untidily lay our hands on every spot that once belonged to us: from Sidon to Sukkoth, from Tadmor to Ur-Kasdim, from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, from the mighty Euphrates to the far-stretching desert..."(1)
Ben Gurion further confirmed in the 17th Zionist Congress the plans for the expansion of Zionist imperialism, for he said,
"in Eastern Palestine, there are broader and emptier acres, and Jordan is not necessarily the perpetual limit to our immigration and settlement... without amending the Mandate we are entitled to ask the right to enter and settle Transjordan; its closure in our faces neither accords with the Mandate as it stands, nor considers the crying economic need of a fertile but under-populated and impecunious region." (2)
Emanating from these same imperialist and expansionst ideas, Ben Gurion demanded in a 1954 meeting that included Moshe Sharett and Moshe Dayan, that everything be done to establish a Maronite State in Lebanon, at the initiative and with the military, political and financial assistance of Israel. Moshe Sharett writes in his diary about a meeting, late in the same year, of the senior employees of the Israeli Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense, where Ben Gurion reiterated his demand that his plans for Lebanon be implemented, and where Moshe Dayan very enthusiastically declared: "The only thing that's necessary is to find a Lebanese officer, even just a major. We should either win his heart or buy him with money to make him agree to declare himself the savior of the Marionette population. Then the Israeli army will enter Lebanon, will occupy the necessary territory and will create a Christian regime which will ally itself with Israel ... and everything will be all right."(3)
For this purpose Zionist plans foresaw the necessity of igniting a civil war in Lebanon and creating a situation of tension. In a letter from Ben Gurion to Moshe Sharett, dated February 27, 1954, he wrote on the one hand: "in normal times this (the creation of a Maronite state) would be almost impossible ... But at times of confusion, or revolution or civil war, things take on another aspect and even the weak declares himself to be a hero."(4)
On the other hand, the main principles of the Herut Party, which Menachim Begin heads, go beyond Ben Gurion's point of view, which foresees the annexation of "East Palestine" (the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan) and calls for its liberation by military force. (5) This was confirmed further by the Herut Party Conference. The declarations of Ariel Sharon, the former Minister of Defense in the Likud government (1982) which call for the establishment of a Palestinian state at the expense of the people, the land and the independence of Jordan (pretending all the time that he is relinquishing a part of the land of Israel as the only solution to the Palestine question) are nothing more than an integral part of Zionist expansionist plans. It is to be expected, therefore, in accordance with these plans, that the 1980's might witness movements in this direction.
It seems that Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, had elaborated a policy for the expansion of the Zionist colonial settlements in the early 1950s, in order to develop the Zionist military outpost, Israel, into a regional power capable of carrying out operations in the service of imperialism. In 1953 he put forward a draft plan for the occupation of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula, just before Gamal Abdel Nasser took over in Egypt. The invasion was to take place in 1953. On October 26, 1953, Matti Peled, a member of the Israeli secret service, summarized the attitude of the Zionist movement towards the West Bank in front of the Zionist movement in the United States, saying: "One, that the Army considers the present border with Jordan as absolutely unacceptable. Two, that the Army is planning war in order to occupy the rest of Western Eretz Israel. At that time, the Zionist leadership snubbed all Arab efforts to reach a peaceful settlement through direct negotiations. Nahum Goldmann, who headed the World Jewish Congress for more than 30 years, recalls that Ben Gurion refused to negotiate with the Arabs to prevent the 1948 war, and accused his foreign minister Moshe Sharett, who tried to persuade him to reach a peaceful settlement through negotiations, of being against the establishment and declaration of the state of Israel. Moshe Dayan also turned down all attempts by the Egyptian and Jordanian administrations in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, respectively, aiming at the elaboration of security arrangements to prevent infiltration, claiming that such an arrangement would "...hamper the movement of Israel," in launching reprisal operations.(6) These operations aimed at the humiliation of Arab governments, the exile of the Palestinians and the imposition of Israel's hegemony and might over the whole area, thus proving to the imperialist powers the effectiveness of this military outpost in keeping the Arabs in place.
Imperialist Collaboration with Zionism 1917-1948
The conspiracy, woven consecutively by the three imperialist powers, Great Britain, France and the USA, and which they hid under the mantle of the tripartite declaration of 1951, and their financial, military and economic support, claiming their moral commitment to the Jews and Israel only proves the reality of the link between Israel and these imperialist powers through common aims and interests. This link, forever renewable through illegitimate interests, goes back to 1840, when oil was being discovered, the consuls and ambassadors of Western countries in Jerusalem and Constantinople singled out the Jews among other Ottoman citizens and placed them under their protection. (7) Herzl succeeded in obtaining a guarantee of support from the German Empire in 1898. He wrote in his diaries: "To live under the protection of strong, great, moral, splendidly governed and thoroughly organized Germany is certain to have most salutary effects on the national character of the Jews."(8)
After the German-Ottoman alliance and the refusal by Germany to adopt the Zionist settlement plan, Herzel's interest turned towards British imperialism. In a letter he addressed to Baron de Rothschild, he wrote: "So far, you still have elbow room. May you claim high credit from your government if you strengthen British influences in the Near East by a substantial colonization of our people at the strategic point where Egyptian and Indo-Persian interests converge..."(9)
After Chaim Weizmann took over the Zionist movement in Britain, he wrote a letter to C.P. Scott, Editor-in-Chief of the Manchester Guardian, in November 1914, in which he says "We can reasonably say that should Palestine fall within our sphere of influence and should Britain encourage Jewish settlement there, as a British dependency, we could have in twenty to thirty years a million Jews out there, perhaps more; they would develop the country, bring back civilization to it, and form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal."(10)
Herbert Samuel, the British Zionist who later became first British High Commissioner in Palestine, scored a success for the Zionist movement within the British Government. He presented a memorandum to the government in 1914 proposing the creation of a Jewish state. With the help of Great Britain and the USA, he then requested the British government (which had not yet occupied Palestine) to give the Jewish organizations all the facilities required to set up settlements, establish educational and religious institutions, and to open the doors of Palestine to Jewish immigration so that... in the course of time the Jewish inhabitants grew into a majority and settled in the land... the course which is advocated would win for England the gratitude of the Jews, throughout the world. In the United States, where they number about 2,000,000 and in all the other lands where they are scattered they would form a body of opinion [that] would be favorable to the British Empire."(11)
When Arthur Balfour became Britain's Foreign Minister, the Zionist movement scored another success, due not solely to his deep relationship with this movement, but also to the fact of his being one of the architects of European colonialism in Southern Africa. Balfour furthermore managed to do away with the part of the Sykes-Picot Agreement which called for the internationalization of Palestine, in view of committing Britain to agreeing that Jewish settlements be a preliminary fact to the creation of a Jewish state. (12)
The letter which Woodrow Wilson, the president of the USA, addressed to Lloyd George, the British prime minister was the main factor in dispelling any hesitation the British Government might have had regarding its commitment to the creation of a Jewish state. Immediately after the receipt of this letter, Balfour announced his declaration on November, 1917.
Transformation of Land Ownership
American money thus started pouring in to save Jewish settlements from actually suffocating in their cradle. The Zionist leadership succeeded in amassing $10 million from official and public sources in order to finance its plans. It appealed to the supportive Mandatory government, quoting Article 2 of the Mandate law which states: "...That the Mandatory government be responsible for providing the country with the appropriate economic, political and administrative conditions, that would guarantee the creation of a Jewish national homeland," and Article 6 of the same law which reads: "...it is up to the administration in Palestine to encourage, with the cooperation of the Jewish Agency, the gathering of the Jews on government owned lands mentioned in the Article requested for public use." Furthermore, in 1921, the Mandatory government altered the Ottoman law which allowed any citizen to reclaim any land and register it officially in his name without prior permission. The amendment necessitated obtaining previous permission from the Director of Lands, who naturally was a Zionist, with the aim of limiting the exploitation of uncultivated lands by Palestinians and restricting land registration to the Zionist movement. The Mandatory authority issued in 1926 "The Seizure of Land Law" with the intention of seizing Palestinian lands under the pretext of establishing economic projects. Two years later it issued the "Settlement of Land Ownership Rights Law" through which the Mandate authorities were able to seize lands that belonged to Arab tribes and families and hand them over to the Zionist movement. British Zionists who were appointed in the Mandatory government received their orders from the Jewish Agency and implemented these laws. The British went on to hand over entire villages (such as Bar das Hanna in the Haifa region) in accordance with the terror, of the Palestine constitution amended in 1932. It also promulgated the "Forests Law," according to which tens of thousands of dunums of thick forest lands registered in their Palestinian owners' names were expropriated.(13)
In order to serve their aims, the constitution of the Jewish Agency of 1929 stated in its Article 3:
"Land is to be acquired as Jewish property... the title to the lands acquired is to be taken in the name of the Jewish National Fund, to the end that the same shall be held as the inalienable property of the Jewish people. The Agency shall promote agricultural colonization based on Jewish labor... it shall be deemed to a matter of principle that Jewish labor shall employed..." (14)
In addition to this policy, which even prevented Palestinian peasants from working on the land where they once worked for absentee landlords, the land expert who represented the Jewish Agency at the Shaw Committee in 1929 insisted that 90% of the lands bought up to that date belonged to non-Palestinian absentee owners. (15)
The Mandatory government then went ahead with the implementation of laws which would secure the establishment of a Jewish state. It thus allocated illegally to the Jewish Agency 195,000 dunums of state owned lands and gave the control of most concessionary companies, such as the Palestinian Electricity Company, the Salt Company and the Potash Company to Jewish immigrants. "The joint total capital of these companies accounts for 90% of the total capital of all concessionary companies."(16) This policy had dangerous consequences, for it appeared in 1930 that of the 86,980 Palestinian peasant families, 29.40% owned no lands. (17) The theft of the national heritage, led to the exacerbation of misery, suffering and unemployment, all of which are part of a plan aiming at pushing the Palestinians to emigrate. In his memoirs, Joseph Weitz, who headed the management board of the Jewish National Fund from 1951 to 1972, wrote: "Among ourselves it should be clear that the is no room in this country for the two peoples together." (18) He then advocates that the Palestinians be exiled to neighboring countries.
At the end of 1946, the British authorities estimated Jewish land property to be 81,624,000 dunums, or approximately 6% of the total land area.(19) This means that when the State of Israel was declared, 94% of the total area of Palestine was owned by Palestinians. Palestinian farmers were able to preserve their land--against the odds--from transfer to Zionist colonies.
Collective Expulsion
As regards the population, the General Monthly Review, which the Mandate government published, estimated in its March 31, 1947 issue that the Arab, non-Jewish inhabitants numbered 1,400,000, while the Jews numbered 589,341. This clearly proves that an absolute Arab majority prevailed in Palestine on the eve of the declaration of the State of Israel. The Zionist movement succeeded in increasing the number of settlers from 24,000 in 1882 to 589,341 in 1947, or from 5% to approximately 42% of the total population, thanks to the help and policies of the Mandate government which had as a task the creation of such a majority. This majority, however, had not been achieved when the State of Israel at last became a reality. It was then clear to the Zionist leadership when Britain decided to withdraw, that establishing a state in Palestine as Jewish as England is English could not be achieved as long as a dominant Palestinian majority population owned the majority of the lands of their future state.
Palestine
The Zionist leadership then doubled its efforts to draw up sinister plans to insure that its colonial expansionist state was created, especially after Britain abandoned the policy it declared in December 1947 advocating the gradual transfer of authority to two provisional, governments, one Palestinian and the other Jewish, according to the partition plan, in favor of a resolution prolonging the period of its mandate over the whole of Palestine till the 15th of May 1948. This new policy was intended to protect the borders of Palestine against any eventual Arab intervention until the Zionist leadership had completed the mobilization of its human and military resources. Furthermore, being a country with imperialist interests, Great Britain aimed at introducing into Palestine a technologically advanced minority of settlers mobilized by a fanatic and highly organized movement. The British also closed their eyes to the secret arming and training undertaken by the settlers, while they brought all their might to bear on preventing the indigenous majority from arming itself, and proceeded to destroy its political leadership.(20) They gave the Zionist gangs unlimited access to their military arsenal and supplied them with firsthand information on their withdrawal plans.
When the time came for the British forces to withdraw, the Zionist leadership had completed the plans it had been working on for more than 80 years. Yigal Yadin, who headed the Haganah Operations, says that the strategic plan was by then ready and contained illustrated details of every Palestinian village and its inhabitants. (21)
The first phase of this strategy was plan "C." It started before the month of March and saw to it that Zionist areas would not fall into Palestinian hands, and that all communication routes were adequately protected. The part of this plan that concerned the Palestinians foresaw a dirty psychological warfare campaign (the Palestinian population was ordered to take cholera and typhus vaccines, as these epidemics, they said, might spread in March and April).(22) It also foresaw raids against peaceful villages where explosive devises were placed around stone houses, petrol-poured over wooden windows and door frames and then lit, and their inhabitants burned to death inside.(23) On March 9, 1948, the Deir Yassin Massacre took place; it preceded the second phase of the operation, Phase "D" which constituted, in effect zero hour, and which started immediately after the British forces withdrew. These operations had the secret code name "Matateh" (the Broom) and foresaw the use of the burned land policy. According to this plan, Zionist gangs blew up and destroyed 473 Palestinian villages and cities after committing massacres against their population, women, old people and children. They often gathered the men in the village mosque and blew it up on them; some were allowed to watch the operation and then allowed to go in order to inform other Palestinian communities of what was going on. At the same time loudspeakers in the streets carried recorded sounds of fear and women's lamentation and then a voice would be heard, as if from the grave, asking people to emigrate: "All you believers, save your souls, escape and save your life, the Jews are using poisoned gas and nuclear weapons. Have pity on your women and children and set out of this bloodbath, for if you stay you would have brought disaster upon yourselves."(24)
Zionist Colonization 1948-1967
In its aggressive war in 1948, Israel occupied an estimated 20,700 square km. comprising nine whole administrative districts and five sub-districts, out of a total of 18 districts inhabited by a majority Palestinian population of approximately 904,000 people, (25) while the number of Jews in Palestine at the time was a mere 589,341 people. (26) After the completion of the Zionist plan, this Palestinian majority dropped to approximately 120,000 to 130,000 people. This resulted in operations of population substitution and expansion of territory unprecedented in history.
Alec Kirkbride, one of the senior architects of British policy in the Middle East recorded in his book his knowledge of a plan to evict the Palestinian population to Transjordan: "... which was (Transjordan) intended to serve as a reserve of land for use in the resettlement of Arabs once the National Home for the Jews in Palestine which they were pledged to support, became an accomplished fact.(27)
The "Jewish Chronicle" published on August 13, 1947 a detailed report, unchallenged by any Zionist quarter, about the secret talks that took place between Chaim Weizman and the British Minister of Colonies. The former requested that the "Arab population be transferred" out of Palestine in order to implement the partition plan suggested by Britain the same year.
The Zionist movement paved the way for these evictions and expulsion in the international arena by issuing resolutions calling openly and frankly for the eviction of the Palestinians from their country. Thus the British Labour Party passed a resolution in 1944 to encourage the Arabs "to leave Palestine" while Jews would be encouraged to go there. This was preceded by the Baltimore Conference of 1942 which brought together representatives of both the Republican and Democratic Parties and recommended steps to a similar effect. As soon as the State obtained legal international recognition, the Israeli authorities spared no effort to liquidate the Palestinian minority which Ben Gal, Commander of the Northern Region considered a cancer in the body of the State. (28)
This Palestinian minority was subject to the British emergency rules and regulations of 1945, reissued by the Israeli Defence Minister in 1949 under the pretext of security--Israel's "sacred cow"--which it used, as did other fascist regimes, to carry out its racial terror policy. These rules, for example, give the Israeli military officer the right to enact and execute any laws and policies he deems necessary without giving the Palestinians the right to appeal against them. These involve administrative detention, exile, expropriation and destruction of property, the imposition of individual and collective fines, the banning of free speech and publication, the imposition of house arrests, and defining "security" or "closed zones" where entry to and exit from are strictly prohibited.
The lawyer Yacoub Samson Shapira, who later became legal adviser to the Israeli Government, or prosecutor general, described the laws upon their imposition by the British Government as follows:
"The rule that was established after the publication of the emergency regulations in Palestine has no equivalent anywhere else in the civilized world. Even Nazi Germany had no such laws passed even at the service of Nazism and the like."(29) Thus, armed with these arbitrary laws and operating in the shadow of a racialist military rule that lasted 16 years, from 1949 to 1966, Israel proceeded during this period to assemble the Palestinians in certain villages and considered them "security" or closed zones, ghettoes or Bantustans, out of which the population could not circulate.
In the best South African racialist government style, whole areas stretching for tens of kilometers were considered security zones; the same applied to the Galilee and Triangle areas in the heart of Israel, and the area adjacent to the Gaza Strip and the fourth area, on the Jaffa-Jerusalem Railroad near the village of Batteer.(30) At the same time, hurried mass expulsions were taking place without interruption. On the 4th of February 1949, for example, the Israeli authorities evicted half the inhabitants of the village of Kufr 'Anan and forced them across the Jordanian border. On December 25, 1951, Christmas Day, they blew up the village of Iqrit and evicted its Christian Maronite inhabitants after handing them a notice to vacate their houses in only two weeks. The Israeli authorities then proceeded to confiscate their land estimated at 15,650 dunums. On September 16, 1953, the Israeli Infantry and Air Force attacked the village of Kufr Bar'am and destroyed it completely. After that the whole village area amounting 11,700 dunums, were confiscated.(31) On February 28, seven hundred people were expelled from the village of Kufr Yasseef, and forcibly loaded on trucks and then made to cross the Jordan River. On August 17, 1950, the ten thousand inhabitants of Al-Majdal, a Palestinian textile manufacturing center were also deported.(32) This mass expulsion operation lasted for three weeks.
In October the Bagara tribe was forced to cross over into Syria. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz published in its November 3, 1953, and November 1959 issues accounts of some of the expulsion operations involving Palestinian bedouins, carried out by Unit 101 of the Israeli Army, which was headed by the former Israeli Defence Minister, Ariel Sharon during the 1953-1954 period. These operations resulted in the expulsion of a big part of the Azazmeh tribe who were forced to go to the Sinai Desert. Bedouin groups saw Israeli desert vehicles appear in their midst day after day. (33)
"Cannons and automatic weapons were sudden and crippling until finally the children of the desert were destroyed. They gathered their few remaining possessions and led their camels in long silent processions into the heart of the Sinai Desert."
The forcible eviction of these bedouins went on, reaching five different evictions in one year for some tribes. (34) After failing to dislodge the Sawa'ed tribe from their land, the Israelis proceeded to tighten their grip on them. They withdrew their hunting and travel licenses, closed their elementary schools, forbade food supplies from reaching them and prevented them selling their produce outside their area. (35) On September 27, 1950, forty-five houses and all water wells belonging to the Na'im tribe near Shafa 'Amr were destroyed in order to force the population to leave their lands. (36)
In 1950, the Knesset took a decision to turn the "Committee for Arab Rural Property" of 1948 into the "Committee for the Property of Absentees" and appointed a custodian who was considered according to the same Knesset decision the legal owner of all lands and property owned by expelled Palestinians. The custodian was allowed to sell the property only to the "building and development authority" which in turn gave it to the Jewish National Fund, thus becoming the eternal property of the Jewish people, not liable for sale or any other transaction and banning all others, but Jews, from renting or working them.
On the 26th of June 1953, an agreement was signed between the government, the "building and development authority" and the Jewish National Fund (a thief with three faces), to "sell" an estimated 2,373,677 dunums of Palestinian absentee lands to the Fund. Some 15,025,000 dunums were later transferred to it after duly channeling them through other Zionist institutions in order to guarantee the "legality" of the property transfer operation. These lands, and those already owned by the National Fund, were later called "the lands of the nation." Furthermore, and in order to tighten the grip on the Palestinian minority who resisted against the organized massacres, successive Israeli governments issued successive laws with the aim of stealing as much of the land belonging to that minority as possible, thus taking away their means of daily life and existence. In addition to the laws setting up security and closed zones, a new law was issued legalizing the use of abandoned lands and another law "for the requisitions of land in times of emergency 1949." Some of these lands were used to accommodate the new Jewish emigrants on Palestinian lands and in their cities, while others were used to house government institutions. Another new law concerned with the property of "absentee present owners," which considered as absentees thousands of present Palestinians who were supposed to be Israeli citizens. The Israeli authorities must have considered "God an Absentee" when they handed over the property of the Islamic waqf to the custodian of absentee property, who in his turn sold most of this property, including the Moslem cemeteries and some mosques to the Zionist "building and development authority." These lands were estimated to range between 750,000 and 1,100,000 dunums. (37)
Judaization of the Galilee
Last but not least of the laws to mention is the land seizure law "the law for the acquisition of land (operations and compensation) 1953-1954" which epitomizes all other laws involving confiscation. It also legalizes all seizures that occurred during and after the war by giving the Israeli finance minister full powers to transfer the ownership of seized lands to the Israeli government, in addition to giving him the right to expropriate and seize any piece of land without giving the owners of these lands the right to appeal. This law was compared to the laws promulgated in Spain in the middle ages to seize the property of Jews, or to those of the Nazis in more recent times. (38) The Israeli authorities proceeded according to these laws in 1953-1954 to expropriate 1,225,174 dunums in 291 Palestinian villages (39) and 65% of the lands of 78 (out of 104) other villages.(40) Samuel Toledano, who was then adviser to the prime minister on Arab affairs, declared that the law involved as well the seizure of two million dunums of land belonging to the Nagab bedouins.(41) The battle over these lands incidentally, is still going on until today.
The massacre of Kufr Kassem in 1956 and the harassment of many other Palestinian villages failed to push the Palestinians to emigrate. Thus a new wave of settlements started in the sixties under the slogan "Judaization of the Galilee." To avoid the racial connotation the slogan was officially changed to "development of Galilee." This wave, which is still going on today, aims at depriving the inhabitants of Palestinian cities and villages of their means of livelihood and at tightening the grip on them in order to limit their natural growth and development. Nazareth, capital of west Galilee, was the first victim of this wave for around it there were in 1953 some 51 Arab villages with a population of 84,000 persons, owning 929,549 dunums of land. (42) Between the years 1951-1976, Israel established 250 settlements as part of the 3rd phase of settlements. (43)
Naturally those settlements were built on lands seized from Palestinians and others belonging to the cities and villages remaining after the 1948 war. In spite of all that, the situation of the Palestinians and the natural growth in their numbers increased the worry of the Zionist leaders. Israel Koenig, governor of the northern province (which includes Acre, Nazareth, Tiberias and Safad where the majority of Palestinians live), presented a plan to the Israeli ministry of the interior asking it to pursue a clearly defined and basically racial policy to combat the Palestinian demographic "danger" which threatens the purity of Israel. In his document he writes that the national growth rate of the Arab inhabitants of Israel is approximately 5.9% per annum, while that of the Jewish inhabitants is 1.5% per annum. This problem, he says, is acute, especially in the northern province which includes a large number of the "Arab minority." By mid-1975 the number of these inhabitants in the northern district was approximately 250 thousand persons, while the number of Jews was approximately 289 thousand persons. He adds that if one looks at the various districts, he will see that in eastern Galilee the Arabs constitute 67% of the population, and in "Yisrael" province (Nazareth) they constitute approximately 48% of the population. Koenig indicates that in 1974 the number of Jews grew in the northern province by 759 persons, while the number of Arabs grew by 9,025 persons. According to this ratio of growth, the percentage of Arab inhabitants in the northern district will reach over 51% in 1978. (44)
In the light of these "dangers," which are based on racial perceptions, Koenig suggests to the Israeli government a series of measures aiming at decreasing the number of Arab citizens and increasing the number of Jews. He suggests that obstacles be created to prevent Palestinian students from joining higher educational institutions; instead, they should be encouraged to go abroad and then prevented from returning home. He advises the impoverishment of the Palestinians by barring them from working in factories, imposing high taxes and forbidding them from operating as marketing agents, in addition to strengthening the effectiveness of the police force in Arab areas. Although this racist document was not officially adopted by the Israeli government, the measures and policies practiced by successive Israeli governments are similar to what it suggests.
Furthermore, Palestinian town councils are suffocating from racial discrimination through heavy cuts in their development budgets and other sources of income. Maps of city master plans are not authorized to freeze development of Palestinian cities and towns and to prevent the citizens from building. Even the diminished budgets of the local councils are approved only after half the financial year has elapsed in order to paralyze their work and prevent them from providing the citizens with daily services. (45)
The Zionist Settler Colonization of the West Bank and Gaza Strip 1967-1977
The war of 1967 left the doors wide open for Zionist settlement construction, and the experience that the Israeli authorities gained in stealing and expropriating land since the creation of their state helped them to accelerate the expansion process. The Ma'arakh coalition set forth in 1967 to implement the Greater Israel ideal as embodied in the Alion plan. The plan considers 40% of the West Bank as territory falling within Israel's expansionist settlement projects. It includes the annexation of the Gaza Strip and considers the Jordan Valley an inseparable part of Israel.
Ariel Sharon conducted an experimental eviction operation when he was Military Commander in the Gaza Strip and Moshe Dayan was Minister of Defense. Through this settlement wave, the party in power hoped to bring together the plan of Allon, on the one hand, and those of Dayan, Yisrael Galili and Sharon which embody all the ambitions of the annexation and expansion fanatics, on the other. Another typical development of the period was the appearance of the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) whose members believe that Messianic salvation resides in the return of the land of Israel. This racist movement was behind the conditions set by the religious groups, namely not to withdraw from the occupied territories except after general elections are held in return for their participation in the Ma'arakh coalition in 1974. The Labour Party agreed to these conditions, thus putting themselves indirectly on the same footing as the Likud coalition.
A ministerial committee representing the Ministries of Absorption and Emigration, Housing, Defense, Trade and Industry, Agriculture and the Interior was formed in 1972 to organize and plan the relocation of 5 million Israelis in the next 20 years, 1972-1992. (46) This project, according to the president of the Committee (Eliezer Brotzkus), involves the territories occupied in 1967. He wrote in an article that 63,000 persons would settle in the occupied territories in the period covered by the project (except for Jerusalem, which the writer considers to be part of Israel). These form only 1 % of the 5 million due to be reallocated.(47) The Jewish Agency, moreover, plans to settle some 100 to 130 thousand persons during the four coming years, and 1,300,000 in the coming 30 years, according to a study on land acquisition and the development of Arab inhabitants. (48)
The Israeli Labour Party and the Ma'arakh government directed their efforts quickly and comprehensively towards Palestinian Jerusalem immediately after it was occupied and annexed on June 28, 1967. A belt of high fortified buildings was erected around the city, and Arab quarters within it were torn down in their entirety to build new quarters for Jewish settlers. Plans were drawn for the construction of more such belts in the form of built-up hilltops encircling the city of Jerusalem. The main strategic purpose of these plans is the isolation, of Jerusalem, "their eternal capital," from the rest of the West Bank, thus making its inclusion in any future peaceful settlement virtually impossible. The second strategic aim is to stop Palestinian natural expansion and growth on their own lands which Israel expropriated to build these settlement belts. Finally, the Palestinian citizens were confined as a result to ghettoes designed to make them even more depressed and incapable of going on, thus paving the way for their expulsion.
Therefore, the settlement effort of the Labour Party and the Ma'arakh were directed towards the Jordan Valley and the adjoining heights along the eastern border. This took the form of two belts, one composed of agricultural settlements on the Jordan River plain and stretching from south of the Dead Sea to the limits of the West Bank in the north where it meets the 1948 Israeli border. Work on this belt came to an almost total halt during the war of attrition waged from the East Bank, and settlement construction shifted to the Syrian Golan till the eve of the seventies.
The second belt was composed of industrial and agricultural settlements stretching along the mountains overlooking the Jordan Valley, starting in the south at the meeting point with the Jerusalem Jericho road, and going northwards to meet the first belt on the northern borders of Israel and the West Bank.
A third belt was also constructed to cover the projects of Allon, Dayan and Galili and involves the regions of Hebron, the settlement belt of Tulkarm and Qalqilya and the axis of the three villages, entirely destroyed a few days after the 1967 war: (Amwas, Yalo and Beit Nuba).
The strategic aims of these settlement belts can be summarized as follows:
The geographical and permanent isolation and separation of Palestine from the rest of the Arab World to the East, and the severing of all geographical links between the Palestinians and the rest of the Arabs.
The encirclement of the Palestinian inhabitants from all sides, thus halting their expansion and confining them to ghettos similar to the South African Bantustans. (49)
To exploit the land and the natural and human resources of the territories including their water, in favor of the Zionist settlers, and to turn those territories into a captive market for Israeli goods and prevent their economic development by encouraging their Palestinian inhabitants to emigrate. The settlement strategy of the Labour Party reflects its understanding of a peaceful settlement. It involves ceding to Jordan (the Jordanian option) the administration of the affairs of the Palestinian citizens in the West Bank, but not of the territory. It refuses to cede its sovereignty on any part of the "Land of Israel" for it considers the Jordan Valley, the heights of Arab Jerusalem, the collection of settlements on the way to Beit Ummar and Hebron and the plains around Qalqilya, Tulkarm and Latroun an indivisible part of Israel.
The years during which the Ma'arakh alignment was in power, in particular the second half of 1975, saw an expansionist leap bigger than any since 1967. The settlement sites, except for Jerusalem, increased from 53 to 77 sites. (50)
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