Showing posts with label Palestine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Palestine. Show all posts

Sunday, November 10, 2024

3658. Arundhati Roy on Israel/U.S. Genocidal War in Gaza/Palestine

 By Arundhati Roy, October 2024 



Arundhati Roy, the internationally celebrated author and human rights activist's speech upon receiving the PEN Foundation’s annual Pinter Prize in October 2024, Roy announced that she’d be donating her prize money to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.

Named for the late British playwright Harold Pinter, the PEN Pinter Prize and the Pinter International Writer of Courage awards have been distributed annually since 2009.

Transcription into Farsi is by Abdi Kalantari. 


Monday, January 8, 2024

3631. Ongoig Genocidal Zionist State's War in Gaza


By Latin Press Agency, Escambray, January 6, 2024



Almost 90,000 Palestinians, four percent of the total population of Gaza, died, were injured or are missing after three months of Israeli aggression against the territory, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor reported on January 6.

The non-governmental organization denounced in a statement that the Army's continuous air, land and sea attacks destroyed 70 percent of the civil facilities and infrastructure in the enclave.

The approach of the Israeli bombings seems to be aimed at carrying out collective punishment against the population and turning the area into an uninhabitable place, he stressed.

Gaza authorities estimate that since October 7, 22,600 Palestinians have died there and another 58,000 have been injured as a result of military operations by the Armed Forces of the neighboring nation.

The Observatory pointed out that the majority of Gazans were displaced from their homes by the bombs and detailed that during the ongoing war campaign, almost 68,000 homes were destroyed and another 179,000 were damaged.

Israel deliberately destroyed or caused serious damage to essential facilities, including 318 schools, 1,612 industrial centers, 23 hospitals, 57 clinics, 201 mosques and three churches, as well as 169 press and media offices, he stressed.

That country's troops deliberately target Palestinian civilians in order to force them to emigrate, in violation of the norms of international law, he noted.

The entity stated that these actions amount to crimes against humanity and war crimes, including genocide.

Thursday, December 14, 2023

3628. Christmas Greetings from Bethlehem

Popular Resistanace, December 14, 2023


Greetings from Bethlehem:

We have been writing annual Christmas messages of peace, for human rights, and relating sometimes what happened in the passing year for decades. Since I returned to Bethlehem in 2008, these messages have been special. Since founding the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS) in 2014, we also added greeting from PIBS.  This year writing seems tougher than ever considering the ongoing and unprecedented genocide/holocaust occurring in Palestine. In the ten weeks before Christmas, more than 20,000 civilians (>8000 of them children) were killed. 2.3 million people were denied food, water and medicines while all means of life around them was systematically targeted. Palestinians (Muslims and Christians) are literally starving to death and dying from lack of medical care. 65% of Gaza residential buildings were destroyed or heavily damaged. Israel also targeted schools, hospitals, clinics, churches, mosques, bakeries, sewage and water facilities, electrical, communication and other infrastructure.

Rubble Nativity scene in Lutheran Church, Bethlehem

 We local Christians cannot “celebrate” or do decorations while injustice persists.  The Church of Nativity during this season usually received hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. Today it is shrouded in dark cloud. We can only pray and meditate on the need for peace and justice in the birthplace of the prince of peace. We native Christian Palestinians (the first Christians) reflect that some 2.5 billion human beings believe in a message that originated with a Palestinian baby born in a manger here. We reflect on the real message of Jesus of love and caring for the oppressed and the suffering. The harsh reality on the ground reminds us of our responsibility to shape a better future. Bethlehem is home to 260,000 Palestinian Christians and Muslims including over 60000 refugees. We natives are limited to live in only 13 percent of our district while over 150000 colonial Jewish settlers live on stolen Palestinian lands of the district.  Bethlehem is besieged and blockaded. Bethlehem University like other universities is mostly offering courses online due to the apartheid system. Bethlehem is isolated from its urban twin city Jerusalem (5 miles away) via an apartheid wall destroying the economy for Palestinians on both sides of the wall. Israeli Jewish settlers and soldiers move freely and have taken over most of our land and natural resources and regularly attack us.

Nativity Square 2022
Nativity square 2023

Eight million of the 15 million Palestinians in the world are refugees or displaced people thanks to a meticulous Western-backed program of ethnic cleansing. The vast majority of Palestinians who remain are living in concentration camps like Bethlehem, Jenin, and Gaza under a ruthless apartheid fascist Israeli regime. Despite all of this, we are still hopeful because we take a long view of history. Some 100,000 years ago humans migrated from Africa using Palestine as the passageway to Western Asia and then the rest of the world. This is where our ancestors first domesticated plants and animals (agriculture and pastoralism) some 11 millennia ago. This allowed development of the earliest civilizations (in the Fertile Crescent), the first writings and the first thoughts of deities. Our Canaanite ancestors spoke a language we refer to now as proto-Aramaic. From this language and its first alphabet came the Arabic, Syriac and Hebrew languages and alphabets. Aramaic was the language of Jesus. Phoenician Canaanites evolved the Latin alphabet delivered it to Europe and it is the alphabet you are reading now. ‘A’ is from Aramaic Alleph (turn upside down to be the symbol of the bull) and ‘b’ from Beit (house) turn to side to see a domed house and so on.

People lived in relative harmony here with nature and with each other for thousands of years. Thankfully very few attempts to transform Palestine from a mixed society of various religions and backgrounds to make it monolithic. The latest such foolish attempt was to transform Palestine into a “Jewish state” (apartheid and ethnocentric chauvinistic state), a state that is failing though with significant bloodshed.

As we reflect this Christmas from Bethlehem, we aspire to a certain future when refugees
are allowed to return and all people of all religions live in equality and justice. Jerusalem/Bethlehem will then become a true light unto the world. We are grateful that there has been tremendous growth of actions by civil society around the world to push for human rights and justice in this “Holy Land”. This has included some significant actions for boycotts divestments and sanctions (BDS) from Israel in the same way we did with Apartheid South Africa.

So this Christmas we remember what Jesus said: “Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are they that have been persecuted for righteousness’ sake for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Luke 6). So think of us Palestinians as you think of Christmas and do boycott products that aid the occupation/oppression, see bdsmovement.net

History teaches us that injustice cannot last long especially when so many people join the struggle. We in this land will continue to struggle and yearn for freedom. We at at PIBS, Bethlehem University ask for your prayers and for your support (time and money) which helps us expand our work with thousands of Palestinians especially from marginalized communities (see palestinenature.org). And do come visit us or at least email us/stay in touch. Such are the best of of Christmas gifts.

May 2024 bring us closer to peace with justice.


Tuesday, November 28, 2023

3627. Washington, D.C. Bi-Partisan “March for Israel” Rally Supports Zionist Genocide in Gaza!

 By Barry Sheppard and Jeff Mackler, Socialist Action, November 23, 2023

From left, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson of La., left, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of N.Y., Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of N.Y., and Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, right, join hands at the March for Israel on Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2023, on the National Mall in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

The November 14, Washington, D.C. “March for Israel” in support of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza had all the earmarks of a US government-backed affair.  In comparison to the largely ignored or barely mentioned unprecedented in size and breath pro-Palestinian antiwar mass actions over the past five weeks, the Zionist-backed event was widely covered by the corporate media.

Organizers claimed that 200,000 attended from across the country; others put the numbers at closer to 50,000, perhaps 100,000.

The rally had the informal imprimatur of the U.S. government. Senate Democratic Party Leader Chuck Schumer was a featured rally speaker representing President Joseph Biden. Schumer reiterated to cheers that the whole U.S. government was completely backing Israel’s war.

Also speaking was the new House Republican speaker and Donald Trump supporter, Mike Johnson.

A big contingent from Christian white nationalist evangelicals was also present and notably the Zionist rightest anti-Semite, anti-LGBTQI Christian Pastor, John Hagee, who was a prominently featured speaker. 


John Hagee

Like other white nationalists, Hagee and his ilk play on the fears of many whites that they are being “replaced” by Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, and others in movements financed behind the scenes by Jews.

The white Christian nationalists add their special viewpoint that Zionism is right, and Jews should leave America and “return” to Israel in order to fulfill the biblical prophecy of the return of Jesus.

Two days after the pro-Israeli war rally, Democracy Now! discussed Mike Johnson’s history and politics as well as Hagee’s, who once said “God sent Hitler to help Jews reach the Promised Land.”

Of course, Hagee didn’t repeat that or similar arguments at the rally, but he did blurt out things like “As Prime Minister Netanyahu says so well, this is a fight between light and darkness, between civilization and barbarism.”

Sarah Posner, author of How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind, was on the Democracy Now! program.

She explained that Hagee only talks about his total support for Israel to gatherings like the November 14 rally, but before churches he says “according to biblical prophecy, that one day Jesus will return and fight a very bloody battle [in Israel], which will result in Jews, and Muslim’s too, either converting to Christianity or dying” and Jesus will rule the world.

Democracy Now!’s co-host, Juan Gonzalez asked her, “What does Israel and its staunchest defenders get from this alliance?”

Posner responded: “What Israelis and American Jews who embrace Hagee’s support get is a huge movement, much larger than the number of Jewish Americans, that has the ear of the Republican Party, that is enmeshed in the Republican Party.

“Hagee’s organization, Christians United for Israel (CUFI),” Posner continued, “has juice on Capitol Hill.  It is more than that. It is common among [white] evangelicals, even if they are not members of CUFI, to share these ideas about Israel and Bible prophecy and the return of Jesus. What they do is they bring this huge constituency to Republicans, many of whom, like Speaker Johnson, believe all this themselves.

“They have morphed together this idea of supporting Israel with being a good American Christian. They believe that God has commanded America as a country, not just them as Americans, to support Israel.”

And Posner concluded: “In their minds supporting Israel involves supporting the occupation, supporting the Israeli military no matter what it does. It doesn’t mean supporting Israel from the standpoint that some day, Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace. That is not part of the equation.”

Democracy Now!’s host, Amy Goodman, then said “I want to play another clip. In 2008 John McCain [Republican candidate for President] rejected John Hagee’s endorsement, after the pastor said God sent Hitler to help Jews get to Israel.

“This is a clip from Hagee’s sermon: ‘Then God sent a hunter. A hunter is someone who comes with a gun, and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter.’’’

Posner said in more recent statements [Hagee] “is saying that God has punished Jews throughout history as part of his plan to get them to return to Israel, which is a pre-condition of Jesus’ return.”

Speaker Mike Johnson’s reactionary background

The new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, worked for an organization now called Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). “It’s a major Christian right legal organization that sees itself as a Christian counterweight to the ACLU,” Posner told Democracy Now! “It is behind many Supreme Court cases, including Dobbs, which overturned Roe v. Wade; and Masterpiece Cakeshop, involving the anti-gay baker [who refused to serve same sex couples].”

Posner had interviewed Johnson in 2007, when “he laid out for me the organization’s ambition to eviscerate the separation of church and state at the Supreme Court and to create a legal framework in which conservative Christians could object to things like LGBTQ rights in the name of religious freedom.

“Everything he said to me back in 2007, ADF has pretty much done and accomplished or is well on its way to accomplishing — undermining church-state separation, elevating religious freedom to conservative Christians who oppose LGBTQ and reproductive rights….

“He also believes that God created civil government and that government should be run from what Christian nationalists would call a biblical worldview. So his entire ideology and framework and way of looking at the world, in particular, are very classic, to the T, of the right, of Christian nationalists … believing that their biblical worldview is what should dictate law and policy in the United States.”

Christian Zionists are both anti-Semitic and pro-Israel. They want Jews to get out of the United States, their anti-Semitism — and by going to Israel, their Zionism.

Zionism’s reactionary origins

To better understand this connection, a brief overview of the history of the connection between Zionism and anti-Semitism helps. An article by Joseph Massad, Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History that appeared on Al Jazeera provides a sketch.

While there were some Zionists in Europe in the 19th century, Theodore Herzl is recognized as the founder and of what became modern Zionism, in reaction to anti-Semitism in the European Christian nations.

He led the creation of the Zionist Organization (now World Zionist Organization) at a conference of European Zionist groups in Basel, Switzerland in 1897.

He and his followers insisted that it is the presence of Jews in these countries that caused anti-Semitism, and that the solution was for the Jews to leave Europe and form their own nation.

He said in his foundational pamphlet, written in 1896, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), “The governments of all countries scourged by anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want.”

Herzl said in his Diaries that “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.”

In its early years, Zionism would invoke, along with the Protestant millenarian Christians, that European Jews were linked historically to Palestine to which they should “return” to re-establish Biblical Israel.

The Zionists understood this could only be realized through a settler-colonial project, which could be achieved through an alliance with European colonial powers. The Arab people who already lived there would have to be driven out. One of these colonial powers was Great Britain.

The 1917 Balfour Declaration

In 1905, there was a revolution in Russia. When it was defeated, there were mass pogroms against Jews organized by the Tsarist regime. At the time, Arthur Balfour, a well-known anti-Semite, was Prime Minister of Great Britain. He sponsored the Aliens Act that prevented Jews fleeing the pogroms from entering the country.

Balfour was the Foreign Secretary of the British government during the First World War. In 1917, as the war came to an end, Britain was set to take over Palestine from the defeated Ottoman Empire. The Balfour Declaration was issued by the British government. It advocated the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and the Zionists embraced him.

When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, the Zionists, sharing Herzl’s understanding that an anti-Semitic state could become an ally of Zionism, were the only Jewish group that would collaborate with them — all other German Jews recognized the Nazis as the Jews’ bitterest enemy.

Zionists saw an opportunity to strengthen colonization of Palestine. In 1933, Zionists signed the Transfer Agreement with the Nazis. Under it, Germany would compensate German Jews who emigrated to Palestine for their lost property by exporting German goods to the Zionists there.

Between 1933 and 1939, 60 percent of all capital invested for Jews in Palestine came from German Jewish money brought in under the Transfer Agreement.

German Zionists supported Nazi anti-Semitic laws

In 1935, the German branch of Zionism supported the Nazi anti-Semitic and racist Nuremberg Laws, and was the only non-Nazi party still allowed to publish its own newspaper, the Rundschau.

Nazi officials visited Palestine as guests of the Zionists in 1934 and in 1937. In the later year, it was none other than Adolf Eichmann, who became a major architect of the Holocaust, who was among those who arrived in the country, and visited a Jewish colonial settlement. Eichmann was found and brought to Israel in 1961, where he was hung for his crimes.

In 1938, the Nazis organized a pogrom of Jews across Germany, known as Kristalnacht, Crystal Night — the “night of broken glass” for the destruction of Jewish property. All Jews, including the Zionists, were targeted, and the German Zionists were crushed.

The defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War, and the horrors of the Holocaust, put an end to anti-Semitic regimes in Europe. But not an end to collaboration between Zionism and anti-Semites, as was seen on the stage of the pro-Israeli war mobilization in Washington November 14.

Formation of the Zionist state in 1948

With the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, Britain ruled Palestine from 1918 until 1947. Britain was one of the Western victors of the Second World War, and was instrumental in forming a Jewish state in Palestine in 1948, backed by the other Western imperialist powers, including the United States. Stalin’s Russia also voted for the UN’s 1948 partition of historic Palestine that granted 52 percent to the Zionist colonizers, of course, against the wishes of the dispossessed Palestinians and virtually all of the region’s Arab nations. British arms were turned over to the Zionist’s already formidable military apparatus. 

The main countries which backed Israel’s formation were colonial Britain and France. Later the United States took on that role. Western imperialism, led by the U.S., backed Israel economically and militarily in all its wars with the Arab countries and the Palestinians from 1948 onward up to today, as a bulwark against the Arab anti-colonial struggle, and against the Soviet Union which supported that struggle (how effectively is another question).

Zionism, from its inception, could and can only achieve its goals by relying on imperialism, as Herzl understood. Until World War II Zionism was a minor and reactionary current among persecuted Jews worldwide. Vast numbers stood in solidarity with revolutionary socialist currents everywhere, including in the 1917 Russian Revolution that overthrew Czarism and capitalism and formally abolished all their anti-Semitic laws and practices. Indeed, Russian Jews were among the central leaders of the Great Russian Revolution of 1917.

That today’s twin parties of US imperialism effectively back a screaming reactionary pro-war Zionist rally in Washington stands in sharp contrast to the inspiring antiwar mobilizations that have been organized around the world. Tens of millions, if not billions of humanity’s best, today rally in unprecedented numbers against the US-backed Zionist genocide in Gaza. The U.S. and its imperialist government allies stand isolated and exposed everywhere.

The world demands an immediate CEASEFIRE and an end to the GENOCIDE while the U.S. Congress votes additional billions to replenish Israel’s undeniable weapons of mass destruction, including its U.S.-supplied bunker buster bombs, the largest non-nuclear weapons on earth. And now Zionism’s “leaders” openly talk of using nuclear weapons!

End All Aid to US-backed Apartheid Israel!

To the Streets!

Ceasefire now!

For the Right to Resist!

Free Palestine From The River to the Sea! For a Democratic, Secular Palestine with the Right of Return of All Dispossessed Palestinians! For a Socialist Palestine Where All Can Live Together As Equals!


Saturday, May 15, 2021

3504. The Cuban Government Denounces US Support for the Israeli Crimes in Gaza

By Resumen, May 12, 2021


An Israeli strike over Gaza City. (AP Photo / Hatem Moussa)

Cuba has charged the United States with supporting the Israeli regime in their indiscriminate bombings of the Palestinian people. Yesterday Cuban Minister of Foreign Affairs Bruno issued Havana’s repudiation of the attacks carried out by the Israeli regime in the last two days, which have caused at least 48 deaths in Gaza, 14 of whom were children, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.

“Cuba vigorously condemns the indiscriminate bombardments by Israel against the Palestinian population of Gaza,” Rodriguez wrote in his Twitter account.  The head of International Relations for Cuba also denounced the “consistent support of the United States for these crimes” perpetrated by the Zionist nation against the blockaded population of Gaza.

The Gaza Strip, a zone called by some as “the largest prison in the world” since its almost two million inhabitants are prevented from receiving food, fuel, and medical supplies by the Israeli blockade, was the target Tuesday of a fierce aerial bombardment directed against civilian structures, including homes.

In addition, in the occupied city of Al-Quds (Jerusalem) at least 500 Palestinians were wounded by the Israeli repression of the protests against the profanation of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the prohibition of Palestinian access to this site, one of the three most sacred Islamic sites.

In international forums, Cuba has always expressed repudiation of the Israeli aggression in Palestine and has denounced the role played by the US in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this regard, Havana has rejected the so-called “Deal of the Century” crafted by the previous U.S. administration, and has warned that that the process of normalizing diplomatic relations with Israel constitutes a serious violation of the rights of the Palestinians.

This new wave of violence was provoked and fanned by the restrictions imposed by the Israeli regime on Palestinian access to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, located in the Trans-Jordan city of Al-Quds, and by the announcement of the expulsion of the Palestinian residents of the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, to be replaced with Israeli colonizers.  However, the spark that has generated the cross-fire of rockets between Israel and the Palestinian Resistance was the Israeli repression against the Palestinians in Al-Quds on Monday.

The Palestinian resistance had been issuing warnings about the hostile acts of the Israelis against Palestinian civilians.  Nevertheless, the Israeli aggressions against Palestinians did not cease and they continued their attacks against the demonstrators in Al-Aqsa, in addition to carrying out air attacks against the Gaza Strip.  Among these attacks were the Israeli Air force bombings of Palestinian homes in Beit Hanun, in Gaza, on Monday, an attack that caused a number of deaths.  In addition to that, a night aerial bombing by the Tel Aviv regime on Tuesday caused the total destruction of a 13 story building in the Gaza Strip.  In retaliation, Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, as well as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad have launched hundreds of missiles against the occupied territories, including the heart of Tel Aviv.

Monday, March 23, 2020

3334. Trump Plan Ratifies Israel as an Apartheid State

By Barry Sheppard, Green Left, February 5, 2020
Critics of Trump’s Middle East “Peace Plan” in the capitalist media claim he has given Israel everything it wants.
Trump says he is just being realistic, recognising the reality on the ground. Trump is correct — he has given Israel nothing it did not already have, except United States official recognition and approval of that reality.
What the critics don’t like is that Trump has exposed their hypocritical pretense that there is something to be gained by Palestinians “negotiating” with Israel for a “two state” solution — a fig leaf, chimera and fakery that never got off the ground.
Trump has given the green light to Israel’s annexation of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the critics say. But these have always been part of Israel. The settlers vote in Israeli elections. They are protected by the Israeli armed forces. They are connected by roads to “green line” Israel that only Israelis may use, separating Palestinians into chopped up portions of the West Bank.
The critics also say Trump has allowed Israel to annex the land in the West Bank bordering Jordan. However, the Israeli army had already taken over that land. The borders the Israeli armed forces defend include the borders with Jordan, Egypt (with the exception of the small border with Gaza, which Egypt patrols for Israel), Syria and Lebanon. The Mediterranean border with Gaza is strictly controlled by the Israeli navy, which won’t even allow humanitarian aid in.
These are the real borders of Israel at present, not the “green line”, which is the pre-1967 “internationally recognised border”. Israel never accepted the “green line” as its border. When Israel was established in 1947 by the United Nations, it was given the majority of Palestine. At the time, the Zionists openly stated that they accepted this land, but not as their final border, only a stepping stone to capturing all the land of biblical Israel, “Eratz Yisrael”.

Zionist project

Trump has recognised the reality on the ground. But how did that present reality come into existence?
Trump has put in place the finishing touches on what Western imperialism has constructed over the past century (and for the past half century mainly the US) to back Zionism’s project.
The reality that is present-day Israel consists of the borders the Israeli armed forces control and defend and the entire land between those borders. Within those borders, there is a single army, air force and navy. There is one foreign policy: that of the Israeli government. There is one currency: the Israeli shekel. There is one official language: Hebrew. In every aspect, there is one state in this territory, and its name is Israel.
Within this single state, there are about 4.7 million stateless Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. They have no say in the policies of their rulers. That makes Israel an apartheid state. There are Palestinians within the green line, who are citizens of Israel, but second-class citizens.
Israel’s Jewish Nation-State Law adopted by the Israeli parliament (Knesset) in 2018, made it crystal clear that no Palestinian state would ever be allowed. It refers to the state as “Eratz Yisrael”, and says it is the state of all the Jews, and refers to Jews living outside as exiles who are urged to be “gathered” into Israel.
What its final borders will be is somewhat vague, but the present land Israel rules will be included within them. Biblical Israel includes Sinai (the desert region in Egypt between the Red and the Mediterranean Seas), so more land may be included.
The Law says that “The actualization of the right to self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people”, so Palestinians have no right to a state of their own.
It says that Hebrew is the language of the state, with Arabic given special status, and that “the regulation of the Arab language in state institutions … will be regulated by [Israeli] law”.
Both US Democratic and Republican politicians accept this as part of Israel’s law.
This reality is the culmination of Western imperialist support for the Zionist aims in Palestine at the expense of the indigenous population. Following the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, the League of Nations assigned Palestine to Britain. In 1917, the British government promised to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.
Following World War II, the UN, over the objections of all the Arab countries, established Israel in the majority of the Palestinian territory. This led to the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and the exodus of a large number of Palestinians, creating the Palestinian diaspora. Palestinians have always demanded that these Palestinians and their descendants be allowed to return to their homeland.
Israel has always rejected any Palestinian right of return. Trump has now put his stamp of approval on the Israeli position.
In the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Syria, Israel captured the remaining 22% of Palestine, including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, where it has ruled for 53 years. It also captured the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria.
Gaza is not free of Israeli control. Every so often Israel “mows the lawn” in horrific military actions against Gaza, causing massive destruction. It has complete control over how much food, water, electricity and construction materials the people of Gaza are allowed — to the point where the Strip is nearly unlivable.

Israeli expansionism

In 1973, Egypt and Syria launched an invasion of Sinai and the Golan Heights to retake the territories Israel had captured from them in 1967. Israel hoped for a quick victory, since the US had built up its military to the most powerful in the region. Israel planned to drive even further into Egypt and Syria, under the false pretext that it was under attack.
However, the US and Israel were stunned when the Egyptian army drove deep into Sinai. The US responded with a massive airlift of heavy arms to Israel, from bases in the US and Europe. This turned the tide, and the Israeli army was able to surround Egypt’s Third Army in Sinai, and threatened to annihilate it.
The Soviet Union, an ally of Egypt, threatened to intervene to save the Egyptian army. This led to a confrontation between the US and the USSR. At a meeting between US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev, Kissinger threatened nuclear war against the Soviet Union.
A ceasefire returned the situation to the pre-war one, and the Third Army was allowed to return to Egypt.
The US supported Israel in the 1948, 1967 and 1973 wars. In addition to spending tens of billions of dollars to build up Israel’s military, Washington also helped Israel develop a nuclear arsenal — with an estimated 100–200 warheads — that still threatens the region today.
“During the last several decades, as Israel slowly took over the West Bank, putting more than 600,000 settlers in occupied territory,” wrote the International Crisis Group’s Arab-Israeli Project director Nathan Thrall in the New York Times, “the US provided Israel with diplomatic backing and billions of dollars in annual aid.
“The Trump plan merely puts the finishing touches on a house that American lawmakers, Republican and Democrats alike, spent dozens of years to build,” he said.
Some of the Democrats running for president have spoken against the annexations, but propose nothing to stop them, much less reverse the de facto annexations.
“Israel’s defenders like to say that Israel is being singled out, and they are right,” Thrall said.
“Israel is the only state perpetuating a permanent military occupation, with discriminatory laws for separate groups living in the same territory, that self-identified liberals around the world go out of their way to justify, defend and even fund.
“In the absence of advocating policies with actual teeth, the Democratic critics of the Trump plan are not much better than the president. They are, not in words but in deeds, supporters of annexation and subjugation, too.”

Sunday, November 11, 2018

3075. Does Criticism of Israel Equal Anti-Semitism?

By Steve Xavier,  Socialist Action, November 10, 2018
Palestine solidarity activists picket the Philadelphia Orchestra, protesting its June 2018 tour to Israel. (Photo by Joe Piette)
The aftermath of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting has focused renewed attention on anti-Semitism. Claims that a shadowy group of sinister figures is behind world events—which appear in conspiracy theories about financier George Soros, the 9/11 tragedy, and elsewhere—have dangerous implications.
These conspiracy theories have deep roots on the far right, where concocted stories involving the Rothschild banking family and Soros (both Jewish) are commonplace. Marxists reject prejudice against Jewish people and oppose any attempt to target Jewish communities.
Recently, allegations from Trump and other GOP politicians that Soros, a major Democratic Party donor, is a sinister force behind the migrant caravan going through Mexico has brought anti-Semitism close to the mainstream.  In his speeches, Trump has also spoken of the threat posed by “globalists,” a common code word on the far right for Jews. Trump has even attacked the ultra-conservative Koch brothers as “globalists.”
Rather than tackling the real sources of bigotry against Jews, the capitalist media have repeated claims that anti-Semitism is a problem on “both the right and left.” Democratic politicians like Senator and presidential hopeful Corey Booker have declared the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement to be “anti-Jewish.” On campuses, there are moves to marginalize pro-Palestinian activism with attacks on the free speech of BDS activists and Students for Justice in Palestine.
On Oct. 29, The New York Times wrote, “Activists on the left—sometimes including young Jews—call for boycotts and divestments from companies doing business in Israel, or the occupied territories. Mainstream Jewish groups are now branding such campaigns as anti-Semitism. Where to draw the line between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism is a growing source of friction in many colleges and state capitals.”
The Washington Post went further in an Op-Ed article that claimed that left-wing anti-Semitism is the major problem: “It [anti-Semitism] lived on in the [Soviet] communist attacks on the conspiracy of Zionists with ‘American monopoly capitalists,’ during the anti-cosmopolitan purges of the early 1950s; in the New Left’s denunciation of a supposedly powerful Israel working as a tool of American imperialism in the aftermath of the Six-Day War of 1967; in the Palestine Liberation Organization’s lies that Israel was an apartheid state that practiced deliberate mass murder.”
Problematic notions have even crept into the fringes of the left and antiwar movements. In the antiwar movement, 9-11 “truth” claims can take on an anti-Jewish coloration when they assert that Israel was behind the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers. In the Green Party, 9-11 truthers and anti-vaccination “activists” play a destructive role. Recently, the Green Party in Ohio had to disavow its Congressional candidate, Jim Condit Jr., after his anti-Jewish statements came to light. In a recent radio ad, Condit excoriated “billionaire communist Jews.”
Former Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, for years a stalwart of Palestine solidarity activism, has more recently appeared at conferences organized by white nationalists and was called out by activists for posting a blatantly anti-Semitic meme on Facebook.
Marxists are clear that such hatred is not welcome on the left, echoing the words of German socialist August Bebel, “Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools.” But at the same time, we reject the notion that criticism of the Israeli apartheid state, or the colonial-settler ideology of Zionism, makes supporters of Palestinian rights and self-determination anti-Jewish. In fact, it’s true that many of the activists in the pro-Palestine movement are anti-Zionist Jews.
When anti-Semitism rears its head in the movement, socialists do not shrink from fighting against those backward ideas. We do this in the same way that we stand up to racism and sexism in the unions. A responsibility of revolutionary leadership is to take a strong stand against reactionary ideas wherever they present themselves. This means standing against manifestations of anti-Semitism in the movement.
The BDS tactic has made it possible for activists to expose the connections between apartheid Israel and government entities, educational institutions, and corporations. By threatening the base of financial support for the occupation, including settlement building, the BDS movement has undermined support for Israeli policy in U.S. society and internationally.
It is this threat to the legitimacy of the Israeli state that drives the attempts to discredit the BDS movement. Zionist organizations and bourgeois politicians who try to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism actually reinforce the growth of anti-Jewish thinking by blurring the lines between the legitimate criticism of Israeli policy and actual hate speech.
Ironically, some far-right politicians have embraced Israel. This includes white nationalist Richard Spencer, who has stated that Israel is the model for the “white ethno-state” he wants to build here in the U.S.  Also, the recently elected president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, who is known for his racist, sexist and homophobic speech, expressed his intent to move the Brazilian embassy to Jerusalem and was considering shutting down the Palestinian embassy in Brasilia. Bolsonaro’s sons, members of his far-right party, have been photographed wearing Israeli Defense Force and Mossad t-shirts to demonstrate their support of Israel.
In a period when the Palestine Solidarity movement is under attack on campuses and in communities, it is imperative that we defend the right of activists to organize and speak. At the same time, we mobilize in solidarity with those communities targeted by the far right and their hateful speech and actions. Revolutionaries always stand with the oppressed.

Friday, June 29, 2018

2954. Join the International Campaign to Free Khalida Jarrar, Palestinian Political Prisoner

By Samidoun, June 29, 2018

Palestinian leader Khalida Jarrar, a leftist, feminist parliamentarian imprisoned by the Israeli occupation, has been jailed without charge or trial since 2 July 2017. As her friends, family and comrades awaited her release, they were instead informed on 14 June that her administrative detention had been renewed for the third time for an additional four months. Take action to demand the immediate release of Khalida Jarrar and her fellow Palestinian prisoners!
As Palestinians march in Gaza in the Great Return March, and as they take to the streets in the West Bank in the Lift the Sanctions movement, the Israeli occupation is extending Khalida Jarrar’s detention without charge or trial to keep this strong, powerful leader off the streets and away from her people.
Khalida’s administrative detention renewal is scheduled to be approved by an Israeli military court on 2 July. Before this approval happens, it is important that international solidarity is heard, loudly and clearly, demanding her freedom!
Khalida Jarrar is a longtime advocate for the freedom of Palestinian prisoners, the Vice-Chair of Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association and its former Executive Director. A member of the Palestinian Legislative Council elected as part of the leftist Abu Ali Mustafa Bloc, associated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, she chairs the PLC’s Prisoners Committee.
She is also an outspoken leader in the fight to hold Israeli officials accountable for war crimes in the International Criminal Court. She is a member of a Palestinian commission charged with bringing complaints and files before the international court about ongoing Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people, from attacks on Gaza to land confiscation and settlement construction to mass arrests and imprisonment.
This is not the first time she has faced arrest and persecution. In 2014, she resisted – and defeated – an Israeli attempt to forcibly displace her from her family home in el-Bireh to Jericho. Only nine months later, in April 2015, she was seized by Israeli occupation forces and ordered to administrative detention, imprisonment without charge or trial. After a global outcry, she was brought before Israeli military courts and faced 12 charges based on her political activity, from giving speeches to attending events in support of Palestinian prisoners.
After she was released in June 2016, she resumed her leading role in the Palestinian liberation movement, only to be seized once more on 2 July 2017 and once again thrown in prison with no charges and no trial. Her administrative detention was already renewed for another six months in December 2017, and it is clear that the Israeli occupation has no intention of releasing Khalida, one of the leaders among the 6,200 Palestinian prisoners (including nearly 500 administrative detainees) in Israeli jails.
She, along with her fellow administrative detainees, boycotts the Israeli military courts that rubber-stamp their military detention orders. They are demanding an end to the practice of administrative detention, first brought to Palestine by the British colonial mandate before being adopted by the Zionist occupation. Administrative detention orders can be issued for up to six months at a time, and they are indefinitely renewable. Palestinians have spent years at a time jailed without charge or trial under administrative detention.
Within the Israeli occupation prison, she has played a leading role in supporting the education of the minor girls held there, organizing classes on human rights and in review for mandatory high school examinations when the prison authority denied the girls a teacher. 

We know that the Israeli military court hearing is a sham. But it is more important than ever that our voices are heard and our actions are visible throughout the next week to demand freedom for Khalida Jarrar. Protests are already being organized in New York and elsewhere around the world. Join us and take action!
TAKE ACTION:
1. Sign the petition: Denounce Khalida’s imprisonment without charge or trial. Sign the petition at http://bit.ly/FreeKhalidaJarrar to add your name.
2. Organize a protest, demonstration or other gathering or event to Free Khalida Jarrar- especially on June 30, July 1 or July 2. Bring posters and flyers about Khalida’s case and hold a protest, or join a protest with this important information. Hold a community event or discussion, or include Khalida’s case in your next event about Palestine and social justice.  Find your nearest Israeli embassy here:  https://embassy.goabroad.com/embassies-of/israelWrite to us at samidoun@samidoun.net or contact us on Facebook to let us know about your action! 
3. Contact your Member of Parliament, Representative, or Member of European Parliament. The attack on Khalida is an attack on Palestinian parliamentary legitimacy and political expression. Parliamentarians have a responsibility to pressure Israel to cancel this order.
4. Boycott, Divest, and Sanction. Hold Israel accountable for its violations of international law. Don’t buy Israeli goods, and campaign to end investments in corporations that profit from the occupation. Learn more at bdsmovement.net.
Campaign Materials
Download the posters/flyers:
Campaign Flyer/Factsheet
Download PDF (A4/ 8.5 X 11)Campaign Poster

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.