Sunday, April 29, 2018

2899. Palestine and Israel

By Brian A. Mitchell, The Unrepented Marxist, April 29, 2018
Palestinians fleeing their homes during the 1948 Nakba – ‘the great catastrophe’
The power and importance of original quotes cannot be stressed enough. It is most revealing and undeniable, especially to the incredulous, to let Presidents, Prime Ministers and military leaders speak for themselves. Through tutoring, speaking, articles, debates and general argument, I have always found that original quoted statements have the most powerful impact; far more than any dialogue from me or any journalist or academic could ever have; and were an integral part of my political education. Many of these quotes are not widely known, some not at all. So please do spread them widely so that many more people can know what really goes on in this troubled world in our name. Although some of the quotes may be dated, the ideology of capitalism remains more inhuman, predatory, warlike, not only murderous but more genocidal every day.
Why You Will Not Find Israel On Any Pre 1948 Map: How the US Stole Palestine.
Ever wondered how Palestine became Israel? If a religion can claim a homeland, a state; I am atheist but was brought up and educated a Roman Catholic, so where is my homeland? Perhaps Rome or the southern half of Italy? And what about Buddhists, Hindus, Moslems, Baptists, Anglicans, Confucians or Rosicrucians, where are their homelands or states? If a foreign peoples came to occupy your country with "proof" of ownership from ancient papyrus scrolls, wouldn't you resist them with all means at your disposal? As for the Bible: (the Red Sea parting so the Jews could return to their homeland, not mentioning how they crossed in the first place): if in thousands of years time, archaeologists digging in what was Hollywood find Walt Disney’s manuscripts, is that proof that Mickey Mouse existed?
Zionists considered settling various countries as a Jewish homeland or state since the first Zionist Congress in Basle in 1897, including British East Africa, Madagascar, British Guiana and Birobijan. Palestine was chosen under US pressure and is undoubtedly less a state, more a large piece of US military real estate (Israel has nuclear weapons) on the edge of all the oil of the Middle East and North Africa, and that is why Israel was created. After all, look who consumes the largest amount of the world's oil resources.
Isreal was then settled by millions of Jews from all over the world, mainly the US, USSR and Europe. Israel's Right of Return law (aliya) permits any Jew or anybody who becomes a Jew anywhere in the world Israeli citizenship. This is remarkably similar to Nazi Germany's Blood Law permitting anyone in the world regardless of nationality German citizenship. Isreal ignores UN Resolution 194 which stipulates that refugees can return to their land and compensation for loss or damage of property to those choosing not to return. But Palestinians who were expelled from their land do not have any right of return. Israel has only to declare any Palestinian land a closed military zone and confiscates the land. It is a demand of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Palestinians recognise Israel as a "State of the Jewish People.")
NOTE that it is essential to be aware that any support for the Palestinians and anything said against Zionism (the creation of Israel) is erroneously claimed to be anti-Semitic (meaning only anti Jewish) by over defensive Zionist apologists, ignorant or more likely deliberately distortive of history, anthropology, palaeontology, ethnology, languages and culture. Anti Zionism is not anti Jewish or anti Semitic. For a start, the Semitic peoples included Caucasians, Arabs, Sumerians (Iraq), Hebrews, Assyrians, Phoenicians (Lebanon, then part of Turkey and previously the former Ottoman Empire), Syrians, Persians, Jordanians, Ethiopians, Egyptians and other Middle Eastern and Northern African peoples. The Semitic languages are part of the Afro-Asiatic group of languages. In some cases the Semitic peoples and languages even precede the Bible, Christianity, the Torah and any Jewish religion.
Elected to my college Student Union because I was popular with foreign students, among them Palestinians, Israelis, Jews, non-Jews and atheists; who worked together in an anti Zionist organisation, all agreed that Israel was created for US geo-political-military purposes to control Middle Eastern oil resources. These quotes are all thoroughly verified and almost all are from Zionist, Israeli or Jewish politicians and authors.
See especially:
"Israeli Apartheid. A Beginner’s Guide."
(Ben White. Pluto Press, London and New York.)
"Against Our Better Judgement. The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel."
(Alison Weir. Published by If Americans Knew )
"The Invention of the Land of Israel."
(Tel Aviv University Israeli Emeritus Professor Shlomo Sand. Verso. London and New York.)

How to Steal A State: First Find "God's Promised Land" in an Ancient Manuscript, Then Occupy It as Quickly as Possible and Eliminate the Existing Arab Population.
“This country exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy.”
(Golda Meir, Le Monde, 15 October 1971,)

“The Oslo agreement is very important for the Palestinians since it is the only official agreed-upon document they got. We have another document, a much older one … the Bible.”
(Ariel Sharon, speaking at a Washington symposium, 8 May 1998.)

"When we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that received us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country. … Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly. Let the owners of immovable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us something far more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back."
(Hungary born World Zionist founder Theodor Herzl, in his diary June 12 1895.)

"Palestine is a country without a people, the Jews are a people without a country. … If you wish to give a country to a people without a country, it is utter foolishness to allow it to be the country of two peoples. … The Jews will suffer and so will their neighbours. One of the two: a different place must be found either for the Jews or for their neighbours. … We must be prepared either to drive out by sword the Arab tribes in possession as our fathers did or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedans [Muslims]."
(British Zionist leader Israel Zangwill.)

"The settlement of the Land of Israel is the essence of Zionism. Without settlement, we will not fulfil Zionism. It's that simple."
(Israeli Prime minister Yitzhak Shamir.)

“At Basle, I founded the Jewish state… If not in five years, then certainly in fifty, everyone will realize it.”
(Hungary born World Zionist founder Theodor Herzl, in his diary September 3 1897.)

"His Majesty's Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which shall prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by the Jews in any other country."
(British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour, in a letter called the Balfour Declaration, (not to be mistaken for the Balfour Memorandum, below) to billionaire Lord Walter Rothschild and the Zionist Federation of Great Britain, November 2 1917; supporting Zionism – the creation of Israel as a state in Palestinian land.)

"For in Palestine we do not propose even to go throught the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country… Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, for far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land."
(British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour in a private memo to Lord Curzon (called the Balfour Memorandum, not to be mistaken for the Balfour Declaration, above), August 11 1919; supporting Zionism. What part of humanity is it that can support something seen as "right or wrong," "good or bad," just because it is "rooted in age long traditions,"?)

"Accept my congratulations on this splendid conquest… We are all proud of the excellent leadership and the fighting spirit in this great attack… you have made history in Israel … Continue thus until victory. As in Dier Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, Thou hast chosen us for conquest."
(Zionist terrorist group leader and first Prime Minister of Israel David Ben Gurion. The Irgun under its leader Menachem Begin bombed the King David hotel in Jerusalem which was the British army headquarters in 1946. Over 200 Arabs were massacred in Deir Yassin in 1948.)

“The past leaders of our movement left us a clear message to keep Eretz [Biblical] Israel from the Sea to the River Jordan for future generations, for the mass aliya [Jewish immigration], and for the Jewish people, all of whom will be gathered into this country.”
(Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, November 1990.)

"The Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt to the Euphrates. It includes parts of Syria and Lebanon."
(Jewish Agency for Palestine member Rabbi Fischmann to UN, 1947.)

"For thousands of years, we Jews have been nourished and sustained by a yearning for our historic land… I believed and to this day still believe in our people's eternal and historic right to this entire land."
(British Mandate Palestine born Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.)

"If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”
(Zionist terrorist group leader and first Prime Minister of Israel David Ben Gurion.)

“Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for Ever.”
(Menachem Begin, on the UN vote to partition Palestine.)

"Here, in the Land of Israel, we returned and built a nation. Here, in the Land of Israel, we established a State. The Land of the prophets, which bequeathed to the world the values of morality, law and justice, was after two thousand years, restored to its lawful owner, the members of the Jewish People. … we have built an exceptional national Home and State."
(British Mandate Palestine born Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. So before the "prophets" humanity had no values or morality, law or justice?)

"Jordan is a part from Eretz Israel in history."
(Israeli Prime minister Ariel Sharon, 2000.)

"We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai."
(Zionist terrorist group leader and first Prime Minister of Israel David Ben Gurion, May 1948. So the Moslem regime is artificial but the Israeli regime is not?!)

”The present map of Palestine was drawn by the British mandate. The Jewish people have another map which our youth and adults should strive to fulfill – From the Nile to the Euphrates.”
(Ben Gurion.)


Occupying the Palestinian Land.
"A partial Jewish State is not the end, but only the beginning. I am certain that we can not be prevented from settling in the other parts of the country and the region.
(First Prime Minister of Israel David Ben Gurion, in a letter to his son, 1937.)

"…there can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 per cent."
(Irgun terrorist group leader and first Prime Minister of Israel David Ben Gurion, speech, December 3 1947, in his book "As Israel Fights.")

"If the Arabs in Israel form 40 per cent of the population, this is the end of the Jewish state. But 20 per cent is also a problem… If the relationship with these 20 per cent becomes problematic, the [Israeli] state is entitled to employ extreme measures."
(Tel Aviv born Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, December 17 2003.)

"During the last 100 years our people have been in a process of building up the country and the nation, of expansion, of getting additional Jews and additional settlements in order to expand the borders here. Let no Jew say that the process has ended. Let no Jew say that we are near the end of the road."
(Ottoman Empire born Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Dayan.)

"If there are other inhabitants there, they must be transferred to some other place. We must take over the land."
(Russia born Zionist leader and Jewish National Fund chairman Abraham Ussishkin, 1930.)

"I don't mind if after the job is done you put me in front of a Nuremberg Trial and then jail me for life. Hang me if you want, as a war criminal. What you don't understand is that the dirty work of Zionism is not finished yet, far from it."
(Ariel Sharon to Amos Oz, editor of Davar, Dec. 17 1982.)

"One certain truth is that there is no Zionist settlement and there is no Jewish State without displacing Arabs and without confiscating lands and fencing them off."
(Israeli journalist Ben Porat, in Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, July 14 1972.)

"after we become a strong force, as a result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand into the whole of Palestine."
(Irgun Zionist terrorist group leader and first Prime Minister of Israel David Ben Gurion, 1938.)

"Ben Gurion was right … Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here."
(Israeli historian in Ben Gurion University Benny Morris, in Israeli newspaper Haaretz, January 9 2004.)

"This is only a stage in the realisation of Zionism and it should prepare the ground for our expansion throughout the country … The state, however, must enforce order and security and it will do this not by moralising and preaching ‘sermons on the mount’ but by machine guns, which we will need. … If we will receive in time the arms we have already purchased, and maybe even receive some of that promised by the UN [US dominated], we will be able not only to defend but also to inflict death blows on the Syrians in their own country, and take over Palestine as a whole."
(Irgun terrorist group leader and first Prime Minister of Israel David Ben Gurion, 1938. The arms were supplied largely by Britain and the US.)

"The transfer of the Arab population from the area of the Jewish state does not serve only one aim, to diminish the Arab population. It also serves a second, no less important aim, which is to evacuate land presently held and cultivated by the Arabs and thus to release it for the Jewish inhabitants."
(Jewish National Fund director Joseph Weitz, to the Committee for Population Transfer, 1937.)

"Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Palestinian) hilltops as they can to enlarge the
(Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours... Everything we don’t grab will go to them."
(Israeli Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon, to a meeting of the Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, Nov. 15, 1998.)

"If I were a Palestinian, I would be a terrorist."
(Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.)

"Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country."
(Zionist terrorist group leader and first Prime Minister of Israel David Ben Gurion. [Only in their view?!])

"Israel is the Jews’ land… It was never the Arabs’ land, even when virtually all of its inhabitants were Arab. Israel belongs to four million Russian Jews despite the fact that they were not born here. It is the land of nine million other Jews throughout the world, even if they have no present plans to live in it."
(British Mandated Palestine Zionist Israel Eldad.)

"Before (the Palestinians) very eyes we are possessing the land and the villages where they and their ancestors have lived. We are the generation of colonizers and without the steel helmet and the gun barrel we cannot plant a tree and build a house."
(Ottoman Empire Palestine born Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Dayan.)

"By a Jewish national home, I mean the creation of such conditions that as a country is developed, we can pour in a considerable number of immigrants and finally establish such a society in Palestine that Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English…"
(Zionist leader and first President of Israel Chaim Weizmann. Ignoring the obvious fact that the word Jewish refers to a religion, not a nationality, that English is a nationality, not a religion, nor is a country a race, and if England is English, then the nation Palestine is therefore Palestinian.)

"Jews have been entitled to simply show up and declare themselves to be Israeli citizens … Essentially all Jews everywhere are Israeli citizens by right."
(Israel’s Law of Return (Aliyah), Jewish Agency, July 1950.)


An Israeli Genocide: Eliminating the Existing Palestinian Population.
"Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both people in this country. We shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in this small country. There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, to transfer all of them; not one village, not one tribe should be left."
(Director of the Jewish National Fund, head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonization Department, the Zionist agency charged with acquiring Palestinian land, Yosef Weitz in his diary, 1940.)

"It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands."
(Yoram Bar Porath, Yedioth Ahronoth, July 14 1972.)

"Our thought is that the colonization of Palestine has to go in two directions: Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel and the resettlement of the Arabs of Eretz Israel in areas outside the country. The transfer of so many Arabs may seem at first unacceptable economically, but is nonetheless practical. It does not require too much money to resettle a Palestinian village on another land."
(Ukraine born World Zionist Congress leader Leo Motzkin, 1917. Eretz Israel is loosely the region of Jordan, Palestine, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, and part of Sinai. Zionists claim it is Biblical Israel, that is if you believe the Dead Sea Scrolls
(the Bible), written by several people over many ancient historical periods, and which was never the title deeds to Palestine.)

“The most spectacular event in the contemporary history of Palestine – more spectacular in a sense than the creation of the Jewish state – is the wholesale evacuation of its Arab population which has swept with it also thousands of Arabs from areas threatened and/or occupied by us outside our boundaries.”
(Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Shertok, in a letter to Chairnam of the World Jewish Congress Nahun Goldmann, June 15 1948.)

"There is a need now for strong and brutal reaction. We need to be accurate about timing, place and those we hit. If we accuse a family, we need to harm them without mercy, women and children included. … there is no need to distinguish between guilty and not guilty."
(Zionist terrorist group leader and first Prime Minister of Israel David Ben Gurion, in his diary, January 1 1948.)

"I don't know something called International Principles. I vow that I'll burn every Palestinian child
(that) will be born in this area. The Palestinian woman and child is more dangerous than the man, because the Palestinian child’s existence infers that generations will go on, but the man causes limited danger."
(British Mandate Palestine born Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.)

"But the leaders … had foreseen this difficulty at the outset of the Zionist project in Palestine. The solution as they saw it was the enforced transfer of the indigenous population, so that a pure Jewish state could be established. On 10 March 1948, the Zionist leadership adopted the infamous Plan Dalet, which resulted in the ethnic cleansing of the areas regarded as the future Jewish state in Palestine."
(Israeli historian Professor Ilan Pappe. Dalet was the Israeli equivalent of the Nazi holocaust.)

“We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, ‘What is to be done with the Palestinian population; Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said ‘Drive them out!’?
(Yitzhak Rabin, New York Times October 23 1979.)

“Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in [Tiananmen Square] China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories.”
(Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, in Israeli magazine Hotam, November 24 1989.)

"We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel... Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours."
(Chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces Rafael Eitan, in Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, April 13, 1983, and New York Times, April 14 1983.)

“We must expel Arabs and take their places and if we have to use force, to guarantee our own right to settle in those places – then we have force at our disposal.”
(First Prime Minister of Israel David Ben Gurion, 1937.)

"Even today I am willing to volunteer to do the dirty work for Israel, to kill as many Arabs as necessary, to deport them, to expel and burn them…"
(British Mandate Palestine born Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.)

"We must do everything to insure they (the Palestinians) never do return. … The old will die and the young will forget."
(First Prime Minister of Israel David Ben Gurion, in his diary, July 18 1948.)

"There is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist."
(Ukraine born Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, Sunday Times June 15 1969.)

"There is no more Palestine. Finished."
(Ottoman Empire Palestine born Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Dayan.)

"What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred for us? For eight years now they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived."
(Ottoman Empire Palestine born Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Dayan, 1955.)

"We are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state. Just as we do not recognise the Arab’s proprietorship of the land, so also do we not recognise their spiritual proprietorship and their names."
(Zionist terrorist group leader and first Prime Minister of Israel David Ben Gurion, 1949. An Israeli government department Naming Committee has the sole purpose of "Judaising"
(renaming or Biblifying) Arab land and villages in order to hide their Arab origins.)

"We came here to a country that was populated by Arabs and we are building here a Hebrew, a Jewish state; instead of the Arab villages, Jewish villages were established. Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. … There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."
(Ottoman Palestine born Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Dayan, to Technion University March 19 1969, in Israeli newspaper Haaretz, April 4 1969.)

"200 ARABS KILLED, STRONGHOLD TAKEN. Irgun and Stern [terrorist] Groups Unite to Win Deir Yassin …Jerusalem. April 9. A combined force of Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern group, Jewish extremist underground forces captured the Arab village of Dier Yassin on the western outskirts of Jerusalem today. In house to house fighting the Jews killed more than 200 Arabs, half of them women and children."
(New York Times, April 10 1948.)

"[Israeli] terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village [Dier Yassin], which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants, 240 men, women and children, and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed… But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicised it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havok of Dier Yassin."
(Letter from Albert Einstein and 27 other Jews, in New York Times, December 4 1948.)

"How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to."
(Ukraine born Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, March 8 1969.)

"Israel's policy – in the last 60 years – stems from a racist hegemonic ideology called Zionism, shielded by endless layers of righteous fury. Despite the predictable accusation of anti-Semitism ... it is time to associate in the public mind the Zionist ideology with the by now familiar historical landmarks of the ethnic cleansing of 1948, the oppression of the Palestinians in Israel during the days of the military rule, the brutal occupation of the West Bank and now the massacre of Gaza."
(Israeli historian Professor Ilan Pappe.)

“A voluntary reconciliation with the Arabs is out of the question either now or in the future. If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison … for without an armed force … colonization is impossible, … Zionism is a colonization adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. … The Islamic soul must be broomed [swept] out of Eretz Yisrael. … it is even more important to be able to shoot … This is our policy towards the Arabs.”
(Russian born Zionist leader, Haganah founder and Irgun leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, 1923. The Irgun and Haganah were both Zionist terrorist organisations.)

"The state... must see the sword as the main if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may know it must invent dangers, and to do this it must adopt the method of provocation and revenge... And above all, let us hope for a new war with the Arab countries so that we may finally get rid of our troubles and acquire our space."
(First Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett in his diary,)

“It lies upon the people’s shoulders to prepare for the war, but it lies upon the Israeli army to carry out the fight with the ultimate object of erecting the Israeli Empire.”
(Moshe Dayan (Israel Defense and Foreign Minister), Radio Israel, February 12 1952.)

Israeli Racism Against the Arabs – No Different From Nazism and Apartheid.
"Zionism [the creation of the Israeli state] is a form of racism and racial discrimination."
(United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, November 1975. In 1991 Israel threatened non-participation in the Israel Palestine Peace Conference and under severe US pressure, the UN revoked Resolution 3379.)

“Hitler’s legal power was based upon the ‘Enabling Act’, which was passed quite legally by the Reichstag and which allowed the Fuehrer and his representatives, in plain language, to be what they wanted, or in legal language, to issue regulations having the force of law. Exactly the same type of act was passed by the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) immediately after the 1967 conquest granting the Israeli governor and his representatives the power of Hitler, which they use in Hitlerian manner.”
(Dr. Israel Shahak, Chairperson of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, and a survivor of the Bergen Belsen concentration camp, Commenting on the Israeli military’s Emergency Regulations following the 1967 War. Palestine, vol. 12, December 1983.)

"The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more."
(Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, August 28 2000, in the Jerusalem Post August 30 2000.)

"When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle."
(Chief of Staff of Israeli Defence Forces Raphael Eitan, New York Times April 14 1983.)

''We say to them from the heights of this mountain and from the perspective of thousands of years of history that they are like grasshoppers compared to us.''
(Isreali Prime Minister Yitshak Shamir to Jewish settlers, New York Times April 1, 1988.)

"We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters."
(Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion’s special adviser on Arab Affairs Uri Lubrani, 1960.)

"Israeli lives are worth more than Palestinian ones."
(British Mandate Palestine born Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.)

"The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews … is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle."
(First Chief Rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine Abraham Kook.)

"The killing by a Jew of a non-Jew, i.e. a Palestinian, is considered essentially a good deed, and Jews should therefore have no compunction about it."
(American born Israeli Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg.)

"There is a huge gap between us [Jews] and our enemies – not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbours here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy."
(Israeli president Moshe Katsav. The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001.)

“Jewish blood and a goy’s (gentile’s) blood are not the same.”
(Israeli Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg, Inferring that killing isn’t murder if the victim is Gentile. Jerusalem Post, June 19,1989.
(Goy: Goyim, Gentile Christian or non Jew.))

"Israel may have the right to put others on trial, but certainly no one has the right to put the Jewish people and the State of Israel on trial."
(British Mandate Palestine born Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.)

"Let us not be too familiar with the Arab Fellahin lest our children adopt their ways and learn from their ugly deeds. Let all those who are loyal to the Torah [Jewish scripture] avoid ugliness and that which resembles it and keep their distance from the fellahin and their base attributes."
Haganah (Zionist terrorist group) commander Moshe Smilansky. Fellahin is a derogatory name for the original Palestinian inhabitants, meaning labourers or peasants, who collectively owned and farmed the land.)

“If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.”
(David Ben-Gurion.)

”If the General Assembly were to vote by 121 votes to 1 in favor of “Israel” returning to the armistice lines–
(pre June 1967 borders) Israel would refuse to comply with the decision.”
(Israeli Foreign Minister Aba Eban, New York Times June 19, 1967.)

“Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our time is the emergence in the newly created State of Israel of the Freedom Party (Herut), a political party closely akin in its organization, method, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”
(Albert Einstein and other well known Jewish Americans, New York Times, December 1948.)

"Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples."
(Republic of South Africa Year Book, 1977, during apartheid.)

"The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived here for a thousand years. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state."
(South African Prime Minister Hendrick Verwoerd, 1960s.)

"The Intifada is the Palestinian's people's war of national liberation. We [Israel] enthusiastically chose to become a colonialist society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the Occupied Territories, engaging in theft ... we established an apartheid regime."
(Attorney General of Israel Michael Ben-Yair.)
Brian was born in the bombed out wartime East End of London and developed an interest in political books early on. He worked in various technical fields for 20 years, all of which thoroughly bored him. He entered academic life (History and Classical Economics) and became an independent journalist, worked for the ANC (secret at the time) until the end of apartheid, and was a trade union representative in a large hospital. He is now retired and still works (when able) as an independent journalist.

2898. Hominids Responsible for Megafaunal Extinction, Study Finds

By Deborah Netburn, The Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2018
A woolly mammoth skeleton on display in Billingshurst, England. The megafauna went extinct 4,000 years ago. Photo: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images.

Thirteen thousand years ago Southern California was crawling with enormous mammals — all of which are extinct.
There were massive mammoths three times bigger than modern-day elephants, giant ground sloths up to 20 feet in length, and strange, armadillo-like beasts known as glyptodons that were roughly the size of a VW bus.
And don’t forget the llamas, camels, dire wolves, cave lions and saber-toothed cats that all called Southern California home.
Today, the largest local land mammal is the bighorn sheep, which weighs about 300 pounds.
And a similar trend can be found on all the continents of the planet.
Over the last 100,000 years, the mean body mass of mammals in Eurasia dropped by 50% and by an order of magnitude in Australia. More recently, there was a tenfold drop in the average size of mammals in the Americas.
So, what led to this dramatic shift in mammal size worldwide?
According to a recent study in Science, the answer is us.
“When we look at the fossil record, what we find is that every time hominids get to a new continent, there is an extinction event, and that extinction is always large-bodied animals,” said Felisa Smith, a paleoecologist at the University of New Mexico, who led the work.
Her research also revealed that if this pattern continues, in a mere 200 years the largest land mammals left on Earth will be the size of a domestic cow.
“And it shouldn’t escape your notice that we take care of cows,” she added. “If they survive, it’s because we want them here.”
Scientists have long known that the big land mammals were the first to disappear in extinction events that occurred in the last 125,000 years, but there was disagreement about why that might be the case.
Some argued that the biggest animals may have been more susceptible to changes in climate or the environment. Others thought the increasingly skilled hunting prowess of Homo sapiens was the culprit.
What Smith and her colleagues found is that it wasn’t just our own species that was responsible for these global changes in animal size; instead, it was the rise and dispersal of hominids in general.
“We are not the only species of homos that ever hunted,” she said. “Homo erectusHomo heidelbergensis, Neanderthals and Denisovans all used tools and hunted as far as we know.”
For this study she set out to discover what effect hominids as a group had, and whether it could be detected.
Her first step was to look at the fossil record going back 125,000 years to see if the extinction of large mammals on the various continents coincided with when the first hominids arrived there.
This line of inquiry revealed that mammal body mass did indeed drop dramatically when hominids arrived in in Eurasia about 100,000 years ago, when they arrived in Australia about 60,000 years ago and when they migrated to the Americas about 13,000 years ago.
In addition, she found that the extinction events were swifter and more dramatic as time went on. The extinction event was slow and long in Eurasia, and much speedier and deadlier in the Americas. This suggests that as humans developed more advanced weaponry, they were more effective at eradicating large animals quickly, she said.
A slightly different story came to light in Africa, however, where the largest mammals on Earth reside today. According to the fossil record, the mean size of African mammals 125,000 years ago was roughly 50% smaller than you would expect, based on the size of the land mass they inhabited.
Smith and her colleagues conclude that the size of large mammals on that continent may have been affected by hominid hunters going back more than a million years.
“There was a long history of hominids and megafauna interaction in Africa,” Smith said. “This finding suggests there was already an impact on animal size at this time.”
To confirm the hypothesis that the decrease in mammal size was directly related to hominid influence and not other factors, Smith and her team also looked at a database of fossils going back 65 million years to see how extinction events were correlated with climate change and other factors.
They also looked to see whether in the time period before 125,000 years ago, large animals were more likely to go extinct than small animals.
This analysis revealed that for nearly all of the last 65 million years, climate change has never preferentially led to the extinction of large-bodied animals compared with small-bodied animals. And in fact, no extinction event before the rise of hominids had ever been worse for large animals compared with smaller ones.
However, Smith cautions that we shouldn’t take these findings to mean that climate change won’t influence future extinctions of big mammals.
“In the past, large mammals were able to adapt to climate change by moving to different regions,” she said. “But we have urbanized most of the land, so they can’t move to cope with the changes.”
Finally, Smith wants you to know that the loss of big mammals has far-reaching effects on the environment.
These land-dwelling giants were so massive that their collective weight caused the dirt to compact in the regions they lived. This influenced how gas was exchanged between the soil and the air, and affected the water table.
Their browsing choices had an outsize effect on the ecology of their habitats and the sheer process of their eating, pooping and burping affected how nitrogen, phosphorous and methane moved through the environment.
“You can hardly think of a way in which they did not have an impact,” Smith said. “That’s why we call them ecosystem engineers.”
So, what will happen to the planet’s ecosystem when the last remaining large mammals like elephants, rhinos and giraffes go extinct?
Nobody knows. Smith suggests that this is a question worth further study. Or at least a reason to push for conservation of the Earth’s last remaining giants.

2897. From a Revolutionary to a Capitalist Politician: Daniel Ortega's Crisis

By Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker, April 27, 2018
Thousands marched in Managua on Monday, April 23, against repression and the Ortega-Murillo government.  Photo: Carlos Herrera /confidencial. 

Nearly forty years since a popular insurrection toppled Nicaragua’s right-wing dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the Central American nation has once again been engulfed by political unrest, and appears to be on the brink of momentous change.

The present convulsion began earlier this month, after President Daniel Ortega proposed a change to the country’s social-security provisions that would have forced taxpayers to pay more for the program while simultaneously cutting payouts to beneficiaries. Nicaragua is one of the poorest countries of Latin America, and public reaction to this change was furious and swift, with demonstrators taking to the streets to protest. The government’s ensuing response was as ill-considered as it was cruel. Police around the country fired live ammunition to break up the protests; as many as sixty people are believed to have died in the chaos that followed, including Ángel Gahona, a young reporter who was shot in the head while conducting a Facebook Live report in the streets of the Caribbean coastal town of Bluefields.

As the civilian deaths mounted, Rosario Murillo—Ortega’s wife, Vice-President, and spokesperson—issued a stream of belittling comments, calling the protesters “bloodsuckers,” “criminals,” and “vampires.” This only raised the ire of many thousands of ordinary Nicaraguans, and, just as happened in the late nineteen-seventies, when the dictator Somoza tried to stamp out dissent with harsh measures, the sentiments on the street have only hardened.

By Sunday, Ortega backtracked on his social-security measure, but his unapologetic remarks on the matter were so casual as to seem offhand, and, in any case, the damage was done. In the street, people continued to chant “Ortega, Somoza, son la misma cosa” (“Ortega and Somoza are the same thing”), and not only have the protesters refused to disperse but many of them are now calling for Ortega to step down.

It’s clear now that, for all their pragmatic backpedalling on the social-security bill, Ortega and Murillo’s long time in power, and their near-total control of Nicaragua’s public institutions, have left them out of touch with the feelings of many of their countrymen. Ortega initially rose to power after the 1979 Sandinista revolution, when he was known as a Marxist firebrand, and he served as the country’s strongman President until 1990, when he ceded power after losing elections. He returned to the Presidency, in 2006, after dropping his Marxist tag, allying himself with former politicos and enemies that included Nicaragua’s corporate class and its archconservative Catholic archbishop, and declaring himself a belated follower of Jesus Christ. In the years since, Ortega and his wife have steadily consolidated their power, eliminating their opponents through a canny combination of economic co-option and, when necessary, outright repression.

In addition to the executive branch of government, Ortega and Murillo dominate Nicaragua’s Congress and judiciary. The couple’s children, in turn, run the family’s business empire via a web of public-relations firms and media companies that functions as the government’s communications department. The Ortega-Murillo regime, in other words, exists in an echo chamber.

There are many historical ironies to be found in Nicaragua’s crisis, not least the fact that, forty years ago, Ortega was a young revolutionary who convinced many Nicaraguans (and news consumers around the world) that he was part of a righteous campaign against Somoza, whose father and brother had previously ruled the country in a dynastic reign that stretched back to 1933. The group Ortega headed, called the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, or F.S.L.N., was a guerrilla army, inspired and supported by Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba. Upon seizing power, the Sandinistas immediately aligned themselves with the Soviet Union and embarked on an effort to help bring other guerrillas to power in El Salvador, Guatemala, and other countries. While Ronald Reagan was President, Nicaragua became a front in the Cold War, which, eventually, thanks to the C.I.A.-backed Contra war against Ortega’s regime, led to the economic devastation of Nicaragua and the collapse of the Sandinistas’ hold on power.

Another irony is the fact that, just as it was at the end of the Somoza regime, the leading voices of dissent and custodians of press freedom in Nicaragua are the handful of media outlets owned by the Chamorro family. It was the January, 1978, assassination of Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal, the owner and editor of the country’s main newspaper, La Prensa, that sparked the anti-Somoza insurrection. Chamorro’s widow, Violeta, was a member of the original Sandinista group that took power after Somoza’s overthrow. But she joined the opposition to Ortega after he turned the government into a Marxist regime. And when he lost power, in 1990, it was Violeta who succeeded him.

Today, La Prensa remains a Chamorro family property, and it is the only daily newspaper in the country that stands in opposition to the government. Arguably the only other independent Nicaraguan media outlet of note is Confidencial, an online publication whose small team of reporters has taken on the Ortega government with uncommon valor. The editor-in-chief of Confidencial is Carlos Fernando Chamorro—one of the sons of Pedro Joaquín and Violeta Chamorro. Last week, in a parallel to the Somoza-era closure and censure of La Prensa, Confidencial declared that its Web site had been the target of a cyberattack and taken down for a crucial number of hours during the protests; to its staff, there seemed little doubt that Ortega’s people were behind the sabotage. “In the protests forty years ago, when Somoza cracked down on the press, the ‘journalism of the catacombs’ was born—people would read the news in church courtyards,” Carlos told me this week. “Now, thanks to social media, the people have defeated the censors and the attempts to create an official version of events. Once again, journalists are on the front lines.”

It can seem as if the cast of the country’s current political drama is the same one that took part in the 1979 uprising, with the players simply inhabiting different roles. In the nineteen-seventies, at the time of his murder, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro’s assistant was a young woman named Rosario Murillo—Ortega’s future wife and the country’s current Vice-President. After the overthrow of Somoza, a young writer named Sergio Ramírez Mercado served as Ortega’s Vice-President for five years. Ramírez eventually broke with Ortega, and, at the height of last week’s riots, Ramírez, now the undisputed grand old man of Nicaraguan letters, was in Madrid to receive the prestigious Cervantes Prize for his lifetime of literary output. During the ceremony, Ramírez dedicated the prize, which was bestowed upon him by King Felipe and Queen Letizia of Spain, “to the memory of the protesters being assassinated in the streets.”

Part of what makes the recent protests in Nicaragua so notable is that, amid a collapse of the political left across Latin America that is under way, Ortega was beginning to look like the Great Survivor. Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez is dead, and his bumbling successor, Nicolás Maduro, presiding over a disintegrating country. Brazil’s once wildly popular leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is in prison. In Cuba, the Castro era is over, at least in terms of sanguineous inheritance. For now, only Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Ortega remain in power out of the original club of hard-core “Pink Tide” izquierdistas. (In Argentina, as well, where the husband-and-wife team of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner played at leftist politics for over a decade, a right-of-center capitalist, Mauricio Macri, is now in charge. And in Ecuador, the Chávez protégé Rafael Correa, an outspoken anti-American, has been replaced by his less confrontational former Vice-President, Lenín Moreno, who appears to have seen the writing on the wall and is reëstablishing good relations with the United States.)

The unrest of the past week appears to have inched Ortega close to the exit door. This is an outcome that he and Murillo did not expect, and they may not yet believe it to be a real possibility. In their televised appearances over the past week, Ortega and Murillo have been shown in safe settings in the Presidential complex, surrounded by a handful of loyal ministers and generals. They have worn the mild and uncomprehending expressions of people who seem genuinely unaware of the reality outside their privileged circle of influence. They have reminded me of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu, who believed themselves to be the anointed custodians of the destiny of the Romanian people until that fateful evening in December 1989, when the cheers of a crowd turned to boos, and would not stop. The look of incomprehension, and then terrified awareness, on the Ceaușescus’ faces as the booing grew more audible was the moment at which their dictatorship ended. Within a few days of that speech, the Ceașescus were shot to death by a hastily convened firing squad. As in so many violent overthrows in history, the men who executed them had been regime loyalists—outwardly, at least.