Mondoweiss
Terrorism: How the Israeli state was won
Middle East
Tom Suarez on January 1, 2017
Initial reports on King David Hotel bombing said 50 dead; the blast killed 91.
But as Suárez explains in State of Terror (p 146), the King David bombing was
not, as is commonly believed, the most deadly terror attack of the pre-state
period.
On December 14, Tom Suárez spoke at The House of Lords, London, at the
invitation of Baroness Jenny Tonge. Drawing from his recently published book
State of Terror, he addressed the centennial of the Balfour Declaration and his
views on the way toward ending today’s Israel-Palestine “conflict”. The
following are Suárez’s remarks. The book was reviewed here by David Gerald
Fincham.
Good evening, thank you so much for taking time out of what I know are your
busy schedules to be here now. My thanks to Jenny Tonge for making this meeting
possible; and I would like to thank three people without whom the book would
not exist: Karl Sabbagh, my publisher; Ghada Karmi, who inspired the book; and
my partner, Nancy Elan, who was my constant alter-ego during my research and
without whom I surely would have given up.
My work is based principally on declassified source documents in the National
Archives in Kew. When I have had to rely on published works, I have trusted
established historians who cite first-hand sources. Everything I will say here
tonight is based on such source material.
Our topic is of course the so-called “conflict” in Israel-Palestine, a tragedy
that has dragged on for so long that it feels static, indeed almost normalised.
But unlike other deadly conflicts, this one is wholly in our power to
stop—“our” meaning the United States and Europe. It is in our power to stop it,
because we are the ones empowering it.
We are now approaching the centennial of the British Original Sin in this
tragedy, the Balfour Declaration. The British role in Palestine was a case of
‘hit & run’: The Balfour Declaration, in which the British gave away other
people’s land, was the hit; and thirty years later, Resolution
181—Partition—was the run, leaving the Palestinians abandoned in a ditch.
Zionism was of course among the incarnations of racial-nationalism that evolved
in the late nineteenth century. Bigots were Zionism’s avid fans—it was the
anti-Semites who championed the Zionists. Gertrude Bell, the famous English
writer, traveler, archaeologist, and spy, reported, based on her personal
experience, that those who supported Zionism did so because it provided a way
to get rid of Jews.
The London Standard’s correspondent to the first Zionist Conference in 1897 I
think described Zionism perfectly. He reported that
…the degeneration which calls itself Anti-Semitism [bear in mind that
‘anti-Semitism’ was then a very new term] has begotten the degeneration which
adorns itself with the name of Zionism.
Indeed, most Jews and Jewish leaders dismissed Zionism as the latest
anti-Semitic cult. They had fought for equality, and resented being told that
they should now make a new ghetto—and worse yet, to do so on other people’s
land. They resented being cast as a separate race of people as Zionism demanded.
They had had quite enough of that from non-Jewish bigots.
For others, the idea of going to a place where one could act out racial
superiority was seductive. As the political theorist Eduard Bernstein put it at
about the time the Balfour Declaration was being finessed, Zionism is “a kind
of intoxication which acts like an epidemic”.
An Israeli soldier clears out of the way as a specially-built IDF vehicle
begins to douse Bethlehem in “skunk spray”, chemical warfare intended to make
life miserable for the civilian population. Photo: T Suárez
By the time the Balfour Declaration was finalised, thirty-plus years of Zionist
settlement had made clear that the Zionists intended to ethnically cleanse the
land for a settler state based on racial superiority; and it was the
behind-the-scenes demands of the principal Zionist leaders, notably Chaim
Weizmann and Baron Rothschild.
First-hand accounts of Zionist settlement in Palestine had already painted a
picture of violent racial displacement. I will cite one of the lesser known
reports, by Dr. Paul Nathan, a prominent Jewish leader in Berlin, who went to
Palestine on behalf of the German Jewish National Relief Association. He was so
horrified by what he found that he published a pamphlet in January, 1914, in
which he described the Zionist settlers as carrying on
a campaign of terror modelled almost on Russian pogrom models.
A few years later, the Balfour Declaration’s deliberately ambiguous wording was
being finalized. Sceptics—and the British Cabinet—were assured that it did not
mean a Zionist state. Yet simultaneously, Weizmann was pushing to create that
very state immediately. He demanded that his state extend all the way to the
Jordan River within three or four years of the Declaration—that is, by 1921—and
then expand beyond it.
In their behind-the-scenes meetings, Weizmann and Rothschild treated the ethnic
cleansing of non-Jewish Palestinians as indispensable to their plans, and they
repeatedly complained to the British that the settlers were not being treated
preferentially enough over the Palestinians. And they insisted that the British
must lie about the scheme until it is too late for anyone to do anything about
it.
In correspondence with Balfour, Weizmann justified his lies by slandering the
Palestinians and Jews—that is, the Middle East’s indigenous Jews, who were
overwhelmingly opposed to Zionism and whom Weizmann smeared with classic
anti-Semitic stereotypes. The Palestinians he dismissed as, in so many words, a
lower type of human, and this was among the reasons he and other Zionist
leaders used for refusing democracy in Palestine—if the “Arabs” had the vote,
he said, it would lower the Jew down to the level of a “native”.
With the establishment of the British Mandate, four decades of peaceful
Palestinian resistance had proved futile, and armed Palestinian
resistance—which included terrorism—began. Zionist terror became the domain of
formal organizations that attacked anyone in the way of its messianic
goals—Palestinian, Jew, or British. These terror organizations operated from
within the Zionist settlements and were actively empowered and shielded by the
settlements and the Jewish Agency, the recognized semi-autonomous government of
the Zionist settlements, what would become the Israeli government.
There was no substantive difference between the acknowledged terror
organizations—most famously, the Irgun, and Lehi, the so-called Stern Gang—and
the Jewish Agency, and its terror gang, the Hagana. The Agency cooperated,
collaborated, and even helped finance the Irgun.
The relationship between the Jewish Agency, and the Irgun and Lehi, was
symbiotic. The Irgun in particular would act on behalf of the Hagana so that
the Jewish Agency could feign innocence. The Agency would then tell the British
that they condemn the terror, while steadfastly refusing any cooperation
against it, indeed doing what they could to shield it.
The fascist nature of the Zionist enterprise was apparent both to US and
British intelligence. The Jewish Agency tolerated no dissent and sought to
dictate the fates of all Jews. Children were radicalised as part of the
methodology of all three major organizations, and by extension, the Jewish
Agency.
Britain’s wake-up call regarding the Zionists’ indoctrination of children came
on the 8th of July, 1938. That day, the Irgun blew up a bus filled with
Palestinian villagers. Now, this was not the first time the Irgun had done
something of this sort, but this time the British caught the bomber. She was a
twelve year old schoolgirl.
Teenagers, both boys and girls, were commonly used to plant bombs in
Palestinian markets and conduct other terror attacks. Teachers were threatened
or removed if they tried to intervene in the indoctrination of their students,
and the students themselves were blocked from advancement if they resisted,
even being taught to betray their own parents if those parents tried to instill
some moderation. Jews who opposed and tried to warn of the emerging fascism
were assassinated, and indeed most victims of Zionist assassinations—that is,
targeted, rather than indiscriminate—were Jews.
From the beginning of World War II through to the summer of 1947, there were
virtually no Palestinian attacks, even though Zionist terror against
Palestinians continued. A British explanation for the Palestinians’ failure to
respond in kind was that they understood that the attacks were a trap, intended
to elicit a response that the Zionists would frame as an attack against which
they would have to ‘defend’ themselves. This was a Zionist tactic noted by the
British as early as 1918, and it remains Israel’s default strategy today, most
blatantly in Gaza, but also in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
As late as the fall of 1947, the Jewish Agency was concerned by the
Palestinians’ failure to respond to its provocation, but when the end of 1947
came and the Jewish Agency could wait no longer for the civil war it needed, it
was simply a matter of ratcheting up the terror.
Throughout the Mandate period, the takeover and ethnic cleansing of Palestine
remained Zionism’s unwavering goal. As but one illustration, I will summarize a
key meeting of twenty people held in London on the 9th of September, 1941.
“To be treated as most secret” is the red ink heading of the transcript.
Present were Weizmann, who had called the meeting, David Ben-Gurion, and other
Zionist leaders such as Simon Marks (of Marks & Spencer); and the prominent
non-Zionist industrialist, Robert Waley Cohen. Discussing the path to the
proposed Jewish State, the conversation ran along the lines of George Orwell’s
still-to-be-published Animal Farm, in which all animals are equal, but some are
more equal than others.
Anthony de Rothschild began by stressing that there would be no “discrimination
… against any group of its citizens” in the Jewish state, not even “to meet
immediate needs”. Weizmann and Ben-Gurion also assured the sceptics:
“Arabs”—Palestinians—would have equal rights. However, they clarified that
within that absolute equality, Jewish settlers would have to have special
privileges. Weizmann’s ‘absolute equality’ included the transfer of most
non-Jews out of Palestine while permitting “a certain percentage of Arab and
other elements” to remain in his Jewish state, the insinuation being as a pool
of cheap labour.
Anthony de Rothschild’s vision of equality and non-discrimination was equally
compelling: it “depended on turning an Arab majority into a minority”, and to
achieve this, there would be “no equal rights” for non-Jews.
Cohen found the scheme dangerous, submitting that the Zionists were “starting
with the kind of aims with which Hitler had started”. Cohen did not stop there:
he suggested that if a state with equality for everyone were indeed intended,
the state should be named with a neutral geographic term. He suggested …
‘Palestine’. The others were horrified at this idea, arguing that if the state
had a non-Jewish name, “they would never get a Jewish majority”, in effect
acknowledging the use of messianic fundamentalism as a calculated political
strategy.
In another obvious but rarely spoken admission, Ben-Gurion clarified that the
‘Jewish state’ was not based on Judaism; it was, rather, based on being a
‘Jew’, that is, by the Zionists’ racial definition.
Asked about borders of his settler state, Weizmann continued in the same
surreal manner. He replied that he would consider the partition plan proposed
by the Peel Commission four years earlier, in 1937, but that “the line” (the
Partition) “would be the Jordan”. This was nonsensical: the Jordan was the
Commission’s eastern border for the two states, and so Weizmann’s ‘partition’
meant 100% for his state, 0% for the Palestinians. He went further still: he
would “very much” like to “cross the Jordan”, that is, take Transjordan along
with Palestine.
At the end of the meeting Weizmann sought to put his proposals into effect
officially in the name of all Jews worldwide. Those against his proposals were,
in his word, “antisemites”.
Meanwhile, World War II was raging. What was the Jewish Agency’s reaction to
the most terrible enemy Jewry has ever known? From the beginning, it was to
lobby the Yishuv, the Jewish settlers, not to enlist in the Allied struggle
against the Nazis, because doing so would not serve Zionism—even taking
advantage of May Day 1940 to lecture the Yishuv to stay in Palestine rather
than join the war effort. Another reaction was to conduct a massive theft ring
of Allied weapons and munitions, “as if”, as one British military record put
it, “paid by Hitler himself”.
1952: The IDF militarily commandeers the UN office dedicated to peace-keeping
along the Armistice Line in order to block the exposing of its violations. (See
Suárez, State of Terror, 301-303.) Photo: John Scofield
Much has been written on the collaboration between the Zionists and fascists
during the war, the best known of course being the Haavara Transfer agreement
that broke the anti-Nazi boycott. One of the least known was Lehi’s attempted
collaboration with the Italian fascists. In its nearly concluded ‘Jerusalem
Agreement’ of late 1940, Lehi would help the fascists win the war, and in
return the fascists would uproot any Jewish communities not in Palestine and
force their populations to Palestine.
If this sounds like a scheme so extreme that only fanatical Lehi could have
conjured it, it is essentially what the Israeli state ultimately succeeded at
in the early 1950s—most catastrophically, when it conducted a false-flag terror
campaign against Jews in Iraq to destroy that ancient community and move its
population to Israel as ethnic fodder.
Violence targeting Jews was, and I would argue remains, a core tactic of
Zionism. In fact, the single most deadly terror attack of the entire Mandate
period was not the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946 as is commonly
thought. Even some of the Irgun’s bombings of Palestinian markets killed more
people than the King David attack. But the most deadly single terror attack was
the Jewish Agency’s bombing of the immigrant ship Patria in 1940, killing an
estimated 267 people, of whom more than 200 were Jews fleeing the Nazis.
The Jewish Agency bombed the Patria because it was bringing the DPs to
Mauritius, where the British had facilities for them. The Agency needed the DPs
to be settlers in Palestine without delay, and was willing to risk the lives of
all aboard in order to get the survivors to remain—which, indeed, they did.
In further violence against its Jewish victims, the Agency framed the dead for
the bombing. It spread the lie that the DPs themselves blew up the vessel, that
they committed mass suicide rather than not go directly to Palestine,
posthumously conscripting the dead to serve the Zionist myth.
This was no aberration, but the driving principle of the Zionist project:
Persecuted Jews served the political project, not the other way around.
Another major tactic of violence against Jews by the Jewish Agency and American
Zionist leadership was the sabotaging of safe haven in order to force them to
Palestine. As but one example, in 1944 US Zionist leaders sabotaged President
Roosevelt’s provisional success in establishing a half million new homes for
European DPs, most of these homes in the United States and Britain. When
Roosevelt’s aide Morris Ernst visited the Zionist leaders in an attempt to save
the program, he was, in his words, “thrown out of parlours and accused of
treason”— ‘treason’, because he was Jewish, and the Zionists owned Jews.
Nor were those already settled safe. In 1946, the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of
Palestine, Yitzhak Herzog, conducted a massive kidnapping operation of Jewish
orphans that had been adopted by European families when their parents perished
years earlier. Removing ten thousand children from their homes was the number
he cited to the NY Times as his goal. In the National Archives, I found a copy
of his own record of the trip.
Herzog railed against the fierce resistance he met in every country by
horrified local Jewish leaders who tried to protect the children. But Herzog
used his political clout to circumvent them. In France, for example, facing the
steadfast refusal of the Jewish leaders to betray the children, Herzog
met the Prime Minister of France from whom I demanded promulgation of a law
which would oblige every family to declare the particulars of the children it
houses,
so that those of Jewish background could be exposed and put back in orphanages
until they can be shipped to Palestine—quite a Kafkaesque twist on Passover for
these children who had just been spared the Nazis.
Herzog’s justification for the kidnappings was that for a Jew to be raised in a
non-Jewish home is “much worse than physical murder”. Yet even this ghastly
justification fails to explain what was actually taking place, because at the
same time Herzog was ‘rescuing’ Jewish orphans from this fate “much worse than
physical murder”, his Jewish Agency colleagues were sabotaging Jewish adoptive
homes in England for young survivors still in the camps. The real reason for
all of it, of course, was that the children were needed to serve the settler
project as demographic fodder.
To that end, the Jewish Agency had coerced President Truman to segregate Jewish
DPs into Zionist indoctrination camps, despite objections that it echoed Nazi
behaviour. For these people who had just survived the unthinkable, then severed
from the rest of humanity into these brainwashing camps, there was no such
thing as free thought.
The camps nurtured such fanaticism that it shocked a joint US-UK committee that
visited in 1946. Before these camps, few DPs wanted to go to Palestine. But now
the Committee found them in a delirious state, threatening mass suicide if they
did not go to Palestine. Suggestions of new homes in the United States, which
had always been the favored destination, were again met with threats of mass
suicide.
DPs were also groomed to bring Zionist terrorism to Europe, bombing Allied
trains and Allied facilities. The bombing of the British embassy in Rome in
1946, for example, was by DPs brainwashed in these camps, as was a
near-catastrophe in the Austrian Alps in 1947 when DPs nearly blew a train off
a steep trestle into a deep abyss, which would almost certainly have sent its
two hundred civilians and Allied troops to their deaths.
German Jewish immigrants to Palestine during war were outraged by the Zionists’
exploitation of the Nazi horrors they had just fled. This outrage given voice
by, among others, the prominent journalist Robert Weltsch, editor of Berlin
newspaper until banned by the Nazis in 1938.
Weltsch warned that Zionist leaders
have not yet understood that the enemy seeks the destruction of the Jews … We
who have been here only a few years, we know what Nazism is.
Zionists, rather, are “taking part in the crash of European Jewry only as
spectators”, fighting the British and keeping Jews from joining the Allied
struggle while getting comfortable and rich from their political project in
Palestine. Recent immigrants from Germany and Central Europe, he said, have no
representation among the Zionist ruling establishment. If they did,
we would have demanded that the Yishuv should put itself at the disposal of
Britain for the fight against Hitler and Nazism.
But—and I am still quoting Weltsch—
They do not want to fight against Hitler because his fascist methods are also
theirs … They do not want our young men to join the [Allied] Forces … day after
day they are sabotaging the English War Effort.
These German Jewish immigrants were shunned by the Zionists, their publications
and presses bombed. Even Kiosks were bombed for selling non-Hebrew papers to
German Jewish immigrants.
In 1943, a man whom British records describe as “a Jew whose integrity is not
open to question” risked his life to warn the British about the threat of
Zionism. For his safety, he was referred to only by the code-name ‘Z’.
Z described Zionism as a parallel movement to Nazism. He warned that the
Zionist indoctrination of Jewish youth was producing a society of extremists
who will use any method necessary to achieve Zionist goals; and he pointed out
that, as fascism in Europe has demonstrated, such a society is very difficult
to undo once it has taken root. The result, I’m afraid, is what we, or more
accurately the Palestinians, are facing today in the so-called ‘conflict’.
How trustworthy is this anonymous testimony? I found at the National Archives a
private letter in which Z is identified — he was J.S. Bentwich, the Senior
Inspector of Jewish Schools in Palestine.
Zionists
would have got further towards rescuing the unfortunates in Axis Europe, had
they not complicated the question by always dragging Palestine into the picture
—so judged a report by US Intelligence in the Middle East, dated the 4th of
June, 1943, entitled “Latest Aspects of the Palestine Zionist-Arab Problem”. It
described “Zionism in Palestine” as
a type of nationalism which in any other country would be stigmatised as
retrograde Nazism,
and stated that anti-Semitism was essential to it. Whereas
assimilated Jews in Europe and America are noted for being … stout opponents of
racialism and discrimination,
Zionism has bred the opposite mentality in Palestine,
a spirit closely akin to Nazism, namely, an attempt to regiment the community,
even by force, and to resort to force to get what they want.
US intelligence assailed “the crude conception” being spread of the Palestinian
people as “a nomad tent-dweller … with a little seasonal agriculture”, as being
“too absurd to need refutation”. The report noted the irony that it was from
them that Zionist settlers learned the cultivation of Jaffa oranges. Whereas
the Palestinians were self-sufficient, the Zionist settlements exist on massive
external financing, and should Jews overseas ever tire of supporting the
settlers, “the venture will collapse like a pricked balloon”. The conclusion of
this early US intelligence report was however naïve, or at least premature: now
that the world “has seen the lengths to which the Nazi creed has carried the
nations”, it reasoned that the Zionists “are due to find themselves an
anachronism”.
After the war, the Jewish Agency discussed its enemies. They were democracy;
the Atlantic Charter, which of course became the basis for the United Nations;
Reconstruction; and the fall in anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism having always been
Zionism’s drug, without which it would be irrelevant. The Agency sought to
exploit anti-Semitism and blamed declining anti-Semitism in the United States
on America’s so-called “democratic attitude”.
Nor was this merely a post-war abuse. Even as Jews were still being carted off
to the death camps, the New Zionist Organization’s Arieh Altman was typical in
arguing that anti-Semitism must “form the foundation of Zionist propaganda”,
and the Defence Security Officer in Palestine, Henry Hunloke, reported that it
was important for the Jewish Agency to “stir up anti-Semitism … in order to
force Jews … to come to Palestine”.
Now, today, when anything approaching this topic is raised, it is twisted by
some into the pejorative misstatement that the speaker—in this case, me—is
blaming Jews for anti-Semitism.
NO. Rather, it is the simple fact that Zionism requires anti-Semitism, is
addicted to it, and seeks to insure that it, or at least the appearance of it,
never ends. One need look no further than the satisfaction among many Zionists
today at the true anti-Semitism of the incoming US administration of Donald
Trump, with Israeli journalists like Yaron London openly applauding this
anti-Semitism as welcome news. More about that in a few minutes.
I also mentioned Reconstruction. As one former settlement member, a man named
Newton, explained, Zionist leaders were afraid that with the improvement of
conditions in Europe the pressure on Palestine would subside. Any improvement
in Europe was an anathema to their plans.
The ethnic cleansing of Jaffa, 1948, as survivors are rescued by boats.
Photographer unknown.
What was the Jewish Agency’s reaction to Britain’s role in defeating the worst
enemy Jewry has ever known? It saw an opportunity for extortion. The war had
devastated Britain’s economy; but when Britain turned to the US for a long term
loan to recuperate from its battle against the Nazis, the Agency tried to
pressure Washington to deny the loan unless Britain acceded to Zionist demands.
The loan was of course ultimately approved, but still in 1948 Zionists assailed
US Congressmen for being pro- Marshall Plan, and the Truman administration
itself dangled the loan in front of British officials when they tried to bring
attention to Zionist atrocities.
By 1946, Zionist terrorism had become the defining daily challenge of life in
Palestine, and one hundred thousand British troops proved unable to contain it.
Anyone or anything that kept Palestine a functioning society was a target of
the Zionists. Trains, roads, bridges, communications, oil facilities, and Coast
Guard stations were constantly being bombed. Utility workers, telephone
repairmen, railway workers, bomb disposal personnel were murdered. Police were
long a favoured target and were gunned down by the dozens.
Among the smaller terror organizations that popped up was one specifically
dedicated to Zionists’ long-running fear of Jews befriending non-Jews, the
ultimate fear of course being polluting what for the Zionists was the pure
Jewish race. As a sample of its methods, the terror group doused a disobedient
Jewish girl with acid, severely injuring her and blinding her in one eye.
Zionist terror was aided by the Jewish Agency’s phenomenal intelligence
network. The Agency had informers all the way to high-placed sympathetic US
officials that fed them intelligence, such that the British learned not even to
trust direct messages to US President Truman.
When the UN’s Palestine committee, UNSCOP, visited Palestine in the summer of
1947, the Agency had replaced the committee members’ drivers with spies; had
replaced the waiters at the main restaurant they frequented with spies; and
most productively, sent five young women to serve at what was called a “theatre
network” of house attendants at the building where the members, all men, were
being housed. The young women were required to be smart and educated, but above
all, in the Agency’s word, to be “daring”. Whatever ‘daring’ meant, they
extracted a wealth of information from the key people who were deliberating
Palestine’s future.
Extract from Airborne Field Security, Report No. 54, week ending 19 November
47, regarding Jewish sex workers forced to be Zionist spies. National Archives,
Kew, FCO 141/14286.
Jewish sex workers were involuntarily recruited as spies. They were told that
upon the Zionist victory they would be executed for ‘sleeping with the enemy’,
but might be spared if they cooperated now. The practice was so widespread that
a standard questionnaire was printed up that the women were to fill out after
each British customer. [note: see document detail, above]
To demonstrate the degree to which Jewish Agency plants infiltrated the
government and everyday life, a couple of months after one coast guard station
was attacked and bombed by the Hagana, it blew up again … but the British were
baffled, because this time there had been no attack. They discovered that the
construction crew that had rebuilt the station after the previous attack were
Hagana, and had simply embedded explosives in the reconstruction, to be
detonated when desired.
But the worst problem of infiltration was in the military service, where deadly
sabotage by Zionist plants who had joined the forces led, tragically, to orders
to remove all Jews from service in Palestine, because there was no way to tell
the Zionists from the Jews.
By 1948, this problem spread to key medical personnel. After the Jewish Agency
poisoned the water supply of Acre with typhoid in order to expedite the ethnic
cleansing of this city that lies on the Palestinian side of Partition, the
bacteriologist hired by the British proved to be a Hagana plant or sympathizer,
an obstacle to the availability of the vaccine. [Note: see document detail,
below. For the injection of typhoid into the aqueduct at Acre, see e.g., Ilan
Pappé, Ethnic Cleansing, pp 100-101, and Naeim Giladi, Ben Gurion’s Scandals,
pp 10-11]
Hagana biological warfare and the “obstructive” attitude of the bacteriologist.
Extract from telegram No. 1293, from High Commissioner Cunningham, “dispatched
1900 hrs. 8.5.48”, marked “IMMEDIATE. SECRET”. National Archives, Kew, WO
275/79.
Selling terror required effective marketing, and for that the Agency harnessed
the plight of European Jews at the same time it was exploiting them. A very
brief look at the iconic Zionist immigrant story is illustrative—that is of
course the USS Warfield, renamed the Exodus for the obvious Biblical
iconography.
The Exodus was sold to the world as the desperate attempt of 4,515 Holocaust
survivors to reach their last hope of safety and a new life, their promised
land. The British, instead, forced them back, not just to Europe, but to their
ultimate nightmare: Germany.
That was the story the US and European public got.
In truth, the Exodus was a monstrous propaganda event, grand theatre, not for
benefit but at the expense of Jewish survivors. The Jewish Agency knew that
Exodus passengers would be turned back, for, among other reasons, their
flooding of Palestine with settlers was a tactic to force its political goals.
And remember that the entire Exodus cargo of immigrants equalled less than one
percent of President Roosevelt’s resettlement plan that the Zionists sabotaged.
The DPs themselves were products of the Zionist camps and had been rehearsed to
repeat, as one witness described it, whatever Zionist mumbo-jumbo was demanded
of them.
As for the return to Germany, it was the Jewish Agency, not the British, that
forced the DPs back to Germany. Attempts were being made to find new homes for
the Exodus passengers elsewhere—Denmark was one possibility—but this was
sabotaged by Ben-Gurion, because it would spoil the Exodus plot.
There was in fact already an alternative to Germany. All the Exodus DPs had the
right to disembark in Southern France rather than Germany, but the Agency used
violence to prevent them from leaving. The Exodus show required the pathetic
spectacle of their forced return to Germany.
The British decided to call the Agency’s bluff. They visited Golda Meir (then
Meyerson), and spoke as though it went without saying that the Agency would do
anything to spare the DPs the horrific return to Germany. They said that
perhaps the DPs do not realize that they are free to disembark in southern
France if they wish, or do not believe the British, and suggested that the
Agency send a representative to tell them. Meir refused. To paraphrase Israeli
Professor Idith Zertal, the greater the suffering of these survivors of the
Holocaust, the greater their political and media effectiveness for the Zionists.
A few months after the Exodus affair, the UN recommended partition, with the
assumption that a Zionist state would follow. This decision was directly
influenced by the certainty of continuing Zionist terror if they did not, as
was the disproportionately large land area the UN gave the Zionists.
According to British Cabinet papers, giving the Zionists so much land up front
was an attempt to delay the Zionists’ expansionist wars. They knew they
couldn’t stop Israeli expansionism, but they hoped to delay it. This
appeasement of course failed: within a few months of Resolution 181, the
Zionist armies were already waging their first expansionist war, confiscating
more than half of the Palestinian side of Partition.
But in a consummately Orwellian irony, the fact that the British were occupying
Palestine enabled Zionist leaders to juxtapose their settler project as a
liberation movement against British colonizers, and thus for their 1948 terror
campaign of expropriation and ethnic cleansing to be spun instead as a war of
‘independence’ or ‘emancipation’.
This so-called war of independence was in truth, to quote the British High
Commissioner at the time, “operations based on the mortaring of terrified women
and children”. Its broadcasts boasting of their successes, “both in content and
in manner of delivery, are remarkably like those of Nazi Germany”. The Zionists
were “jubilant” he reported, with “their campaign of calculated aggression
coupled with brutality”.
British intelligence, meanwhile, reported that “the internal machinery of the
Jewish State and all the equipment of a totalitarian regime is complete,
including a Custodian of Enemy Property to handle Arab lands”.
In the Yishuv itself, “persecution of Christian Jews”, by which I assume they
meant converts, “and others who offend against national discipline has shown a
marked increase and in some cases has reached mediaeval standards”.
All this, to be sure, was before any Arab resistance.
Finally, on the 15th of May, 1948, Britain fled the scene of its crime, for
which the Palestinians have been paying ever since. The post-statehood period
continued full throttle with the same violent messianic goals, evolving with
the new dynamics.
Now, there is no point in my having taken up your time here, no point any tree
wasting its paper on this book, unless I thought that it had some value in the
collective effort toward ending the conflict. So … How do I think that this
book, how do I think my approach, might be constructive?
The historical record makes plain what should already have been obvious from
the present reality—that Israel’s and Zionism’s pretenses regarding Jews and
Judaism, and in particular its pretense of being a response to anti-Semitism
and Jewish persecution, is a fraud. Indeed quite the opposite, it thrives by
exacerbating and capitalizing on these, and has turned them into a cynical,
deadly business.
Exposing this, in my opinion, is Israel’s—and the conflict’s—Achilles Heel. And
this should be a simple case of the Emperor’s New Clothes—except that every
time the child points out that the Emperor is naked, he or she is labelled an
anti-Semite and silenced.
The IDF attacks the area between the ‘Azza and Aida refugee camps, Bethlehem,
as an ambulance (center, background) tries to rescue victims. December, 2015.
Photo: T Suárez
The US and other governments empower the conflict for their own geopolitical
reasons, but why do the publics of those allegedly democratic countries give
their tacit acquiescence?
Israel has one of the world’s largest militaries, but its most powerful weapon,
the one without which all its others would be impotent, is its Narrative, its
creation myth, its auto-biography.
Under the Twilight Zone of this Narrative, Israel is not merely a political
entity like any other nation-state, but is transformed into the Old Testament
kingdom whose name it adopted for that strategic purpose, striking a powerful
chord in the collective Western sub-conscious.
We all know the Narrative more or less, but in order for that Narrative to be
ever-present, Israel has crammed it into a 3-word mantra: ‘The Jewish State’.
This phrase—Israel’s self-identity—is a unique construct in the modern world.
It is qualitatively distinct from any other country’s relationship with any
other religion or cultural group. Judaism is not Israel’s state religion in the
sense of a national faith that any nation might adopt. Rather, it presents
itself as THE Jewish state, the metaphysical embodiment of Jewry itself, of
Judaism, Jewish history, culture, persecution, and most cynical and
exploitative of all, the Holocaust.
No country claims it is the Catholic state. Costa Rica, for example, is a
Catholic state; it does not suggest that it owns Catholicism, Catholics, or
historic Christian martyrdom. We do not have the British government issuing
guidelines as to when criticism of the Costa Rican government becomes
anti-Catholic hate speech. Norway is a Lutheran state; Tunisia is one of
several nations that maintains Islam as a national faith; Cambodia is a
Buddhist state. Israel, in contrast, would never acknowledge even the
possibility of another Jewish state because it has body-snatched everything
Jewish, and holds it hostage to empower its crimes.
Criticise Israeli terror, you will instead hit this three-word human
shield—‘The Jewish State’— that Israel hides behind.
What other country on this earth is permitted this perverse tribal claim over a
religious or cultural group? This self-proclaimed exceptionalism should strike
us as bizarre—even weird—yet we continue to be party to it.
We hear a lot about anti-Semitism these days, and there is of course
anti-Semitism in the world, as there are all varieties of bigotry. But let’s
just blurt out the obvious: Virtually all of the alleged anti-Semitism we hear
about from the Zionists is a lie, smears calculated to silence anyone who seeks
to end the horror.
This smear campaign has been compared to the McCarthy witch hunt of the 1950s,
but it is in truth much worse, because whereas Communism is merely a political
and economic theory that one can argue for or against, anti-Semitism is
inherently evil. In other words, with McCarthyism, one could ultimately respond
by saying, Well, let’s say I am a communist, so what?
Zionism’s abuse of anti-Semitism, its exploitation of Judaism and historic
Jewish persecution for immoral ends, is profoundly anti-Semitic. Zionism, taken
at its word, makes Judaism complicit in its crimes, and thus—taken at its
word—succeeds where all the conventional bigots throughout the centuries were
powerless.
Meanwhile, as we are seeing more bluntly than ever in the United States, true
anti-Semitism is embraced by Zionists because it is invariably pro-Israel.
One hundred years ago, MP Edwin Montagu accused the British government of
anti-Semitism for colluding with the Zionists. History has proven him correct.
If Israel is forced to stop this anti-Semitic abuse, if it is forced to come
out from hiding behind its human shield, the conflict will be seen for what it
is and so could not continue. Israel-Palestine will become a democratic,
secular country of equals.
And what more poetic year than the Balfour centennial for that to happen.
Thank you.
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Terrorism: How the Israeli state was won
Middle East
Tom Suarez on January 1, 2017 16 Comments
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Initial reports on King David Hotel bombing said 50 dead; the blast killed 91.
But as Suárez explains in State of Terror (p 146), the King David bombing was
not, as is commonly believed, the most deadly terror attack of the pre-state
period.
On December 14, Tom Suárez spoke at The House of Lords, London, at the
invitation of Baroness Jenny Tonge. Drawing from his recently published book
State of Terror, he addressed the centennial of the Balfour Declaration and his
views on the way toward ending today’s Israel-Palestine “conflict”. The
following are Suárez’s remarks. The book was reviewed here by David Gerald
Fincham.
Good evening, thank you so much for taking time out of what I know are your
busy schedules to be here now. My thanks to Jenny Tonge for making this meeting
possible; and I would like to thank three people without whom the book would
not exist: Karl Sabbagh, my publisher; Ghada Karmi, who inspired the book; and
my partner, Nancy Elan, who was my constant alter-ego during my research and
without whom I surely would have given up.
My work is based principally on declassified source documents in the National
Archives in Kew. When I have had to rely on published works, I have trusted
established historians who cite first-hand sources. Everything I will say here
tonight is based on such source material.
Our topic is of course the so-called “conflict” in Israel-Palestine, a tragedy
that has dragged on for so long that it feels static, indeed almost normalised.
But unlike other deadly conflicts, this one is wholly in our power to
stop—“our” meaning the United States and Europe. It is in our power to stop it,
because we are the ones empowering it.
We are now approaching the centennial of the British Original Sin in this
tragedy, the Balfour Declaration. The British role in Palestine was a case of
‘hit & run’: The Balfour Declaration, in which the British gave away other
people’s land, was the hit; and thirty years later, Resolution
181—Partition—was the run, leaving the Palestinians abandoned in a ditch.
Zionism was of course among the incarnations of racial-nationalism that evolved
in the late nineteenth century. Bigots were Zionism’s avid fans—it was the
anti-Semites who championed the Zionists. Gertrude Bell, the famous English
writer, traveler, archaeologist, and spy, reported, based on her personal
experience, that those who supported Zionism did so because it provided a way
to get rid of Jews.
The London Standard’s correspondent to the first Zionist Conference in 1897 I
think described Zionism perfectly. He reported that
…the degeneration which calls itself Anti-Semitism [bear in mind that
‘anti-Semitism’ was then a very new term] has begotten the degeneration which
adorns itself with the name of Zionism.
Indeed, most Jews and Jewish leaders dismissed Zionism as the latest
anti-Semitic cult. They had fought for equality, and resented being told that
they should now make a new ghetto—and worse yet, to do so on other people’s
land. They resented being cast as a separate race of people as Zionism demanded.
They had had quite enough of that from non-Jewish bigots.
For others, the idea of going to a place where one could act out racial
superiority was seductive. As the political theorist Eduard Bernstein put it at
about the time the Balfour Declaration was being finessed, Zionism is “a kind
of intoxication which acts like an epidemic”.
An Israeli soldier clears out of the way as a specially-built IDF vehicle
begins to douse Bethlehem in “skunk spray”, chemical warfare intended to make
life miserable for the civilian population. Photo: T Suárez
By the time the Balfour Declaration was finalised, thirty-plus years of Zionist
settlement had made clear that the Zionists intended to ethnically cleanse the
land for a settler state based on racial superiority; and it was the
behind-the-scenes demands of the principal Zionist leaders, notably Chaim
Weizmann and Baron Rothschild.
First-hand accounts of Zionist settlement in Palestine had already painted a
picture of violent racial displacement. I will cite one of the lesser known
reports, by Dr. Paul Nathan, a prominent Jewish leader in Berlin, who went to
Palestine on behalf of the German Jewish National Relief Association. He was so
horrified by what he found that he published a pamphlet in January, 1914, in
which he described the Zionist settlers as carrying on
a campaign of terror modelled almost on Russian pogrom models.
A few years later, the Balfour Declaration’s deliberately ambiguous wording was
being finalized. Sceptics—and the British Cabinet—were assured that it did not
mean a Zionist state. Yet simultaneously, Weizmann was pushing to create that
very state immediately. He demanded that his state extend all the way to the
Jordan River within three or four years of the Declaration—that is, by 1921—and
then expand beyond it.
In their behind-the-scenes meetings, Weizmann and Rothschild treated the ethnic
cleansing of non-Jewish Palestinians as indispensable to their plans, and they
repeatedly complained to the British that the settlers were not being treated
preferentially enough over the Palestinians. And they insisted that the British
must lie about the scheme until it is too late for anyone to do anything about
it.
In correspondence with Balfour, Weizmann justified his lies by slandering the
Palestinians and Jews—that is, the Middle East’s indigenous Jews, who were
overwhelmingly opposed to Zionism and whom Weizmann smeared with classic
anti-Semitic stereotypes. The Palestinians he dismissed as, in so many words, a
lower type of human, and this was among the reasons he and other Zionist
leaders used for refusing democracy in Palestine—if the “Arabs” had the vote,
he said, it would lower the Jew down to the level of a “native”.
With the establishment of the British Mandate, four decades of peaceful
Palestinian resistance had proved futile, and armed Palestinian
resistance—which included terrorism—began. Zionist terror became the domain of
formal organizations that attacked anyone in the way of its messianic
goals—Palestinian, Jew, or British. These terror organizations operated from
within the Zionist settlements and were actively empowered and shielded by the
settlements and the Jewish Agency, the recognized semi-autonomous government of
the Zionist settlements, what would become the Israeli government.
There was no substantive difference between the acknowledged terror
organizations—most famously, the Irgun, and Lehi, the so-called Stern Gang—and
the Jewish Agency, and its terror gang, the Hagana. The Agency cooperated,
collaborated, and even helped finance the Irgun.
The relationship between the Jewish Agency, and the Irgun and Lehi, was
symbiotic. The Irgun in particular would act on behalf of the Hagana so that
the Jewish Agency could feign innocence. The Agency would then tell the British
that they condemn the terror, while steadfastly refusing any cooperation
against it, indeed doing what they could to shield it.
The fascist nature of the Zionist enterprise was apparent both to US and
British intelligence. The Jewish Agency tolerated no dissent and sought to
dictate the fates of all Jews. Children were radicalised as part of the
methodology of all three major organizations, and by extension, the Jewish
Agency.
Britain’s wake-up call regarding the Zionists’ indoctrination of children came
on the 8th of July, 1938. That day, the Irgun blew up a bus filled with
Palestinian villagers. Now, this was not the first time the Irgun had done
something of this sort, but this time the British caught the bomber. She was a
twelve year old schoolgirl.
Teenagers, both boys and girls, were commonly used to plant bombs in
Palestinian markets and conduct other terror attacks. Teachers were threatened
or removed if they tried to intervene in the indoctrination of their students,
and the students themselves were blocked from advancement if they resisted,
even being taught to betray their own parents if those parents tried to instill
some moderation. Jews who opposed and tried to warn of the emerging fascism
were assassinated, and indeed most victims of Zionist assassinations—that is,
targeted, rather than indiscriminate—were Jews.
From the beginning of World War II through to the summer of 1947, there were
virtually no Palestinian attacks, even though Zionist terror against
Palestinians continued. A British explanation for the Palestinians’ failure to
respond in kind was that they understood that the attacks were a trap, intended
to elicit a response that the Zionists would frame as an attack against which
they would have to ‘defend’ themselves. This was a Zionist tactic noted by the
British as early as 1918, and it remains Israel’s default strategy today, most
blatantly in Gaza, but also in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
As late as the fall of 1947, the Jewish Agency was concerned by the
Palestinians’ failure to respond to its provocation, but when the end of 1947
came and the Jewish Agency could wait no longer for the civil war it needed, it
was simply a matter of ratcheting up the terror.
Throughout the Mandate period, the takeover and ethnic cleansing of Palestine
remained Zionism’s unwavering goal. As but one illustration, I will summarize a
key meeting of twenty people held in London on the 9th of September, 1941.
“To be treated as most secret” is the red ink heading of the transcript.
Present were Weizmann, who had called the meeting, David Ben-Gurion, and other
Zionist leaders such as Simon Marks (of Marks & Spencer); and the prominent
non-Zionist industrialist, Robert Waley Cohen. Discussing the path to the
proposed Jewish State, the conversation ran along the lines of George Orwell’s
still-to-be-published Animal Farm, in which all animals are equal, but some are
more equal than others.
Anthony de Rothschild began by stressing that there would be no “discrimination
… against any group of its citizens” in the Jewish state, not even “to meet
immediate needs”. Weizmann and Ben-Gurion also assured the sceptics:
“Arabs”—Palestinians—would have equal rights. However, they clarified that
within that absolute equality, Jewish settlers would have to have special
privileges. Weizmann’s ‘absolute equality’ included the transfer of most
non-Jews out of Palestine while permitting “a certain percentage of Arab and
other elements” to remain in his Jewish state, the insinuation being as a pool
of cheap labour.
Anthony de Rothschild’s vision of equality and non-discrimination was equally
compelling: it “depended on turning an Arab majority into a minority”, and to
achieve this, there would be “no equal rights” for non-Jews.
Cohen found the scheme dangerous, submitting that the Zionists were “starting
with the kind of aims with which Hitler had started”. Cohen did not stop there:
he suggested that if a state with equality for everyone were indeed intended,
the state should be named with a neutral geographic term. He suggested …
‘Palestine’. The others were horrified at this idea, arguing that if the state
had a non-Jewish name, “they would never get a Jewish majority”, in effect
acknowledging the use of messianic fundamentalism as a calculated political
strategy.
In another obvious but rarely spoken admission, Ben-Gurion clarified that the
‘Jewish state’ was not based on Judaism; it was, rather, based on being a
‘Jew’, that is, by the Zionists’ racial definition.
Asked about borders of his settler state, Weizmann continued in the same
surreal manner. He replied that he would consider the partition plan proposed
by the Peel Commission four years earlier, in 1937, but that “the line” (the
Partition) “would be the Jordan”. This was nonsensical: the Jordan was the
Commission’s eastern border for the two states, and so Weizmann’s ‘partition’
meant 100% for his state, 0% for the Palestinians. He went further still: he
would “very much” like to “cross the Jordan”, that is, take Transjordan along
with Palestine.
At the end of the meeting Weizmann sought to put his proposals into effect
officially in the name of all Jews worldwide. Those against his proposals were,
in his word, “antisemites”.
Meanwhile, World War II was raging. What was the Jewish Agency’s reaction to
the most terrible enemy Jewry has ever known? From the beginning, it was to
lobby the Yishuv, the Jewish settlers, not to enlist in the Allied struggle
against the Nazis, because doing so would not serve Zionism—even taking
advantage of May Day 1940 to lecture the Yishuv to stay in Palestine rather
than join the war effort. Another reaction was to conduct a massive theft ring
of Allied weapons and munitions, “as if”, as one British military record put
it, “paid by Hitler himself”.
1952: The IDF militarily commandeers the UN office dedicated to peace-keeping
along the Armistice Line in order to block the exposing of its violations. (See
Suárez, State of Terror, 301-303.) Photo: John Scofield
Much has been written on the collaboration between the Zionists and fascists
during the war, the best known of course being the Haavara Transfer agreement
that broke the anti-Nazi boycott. One of the least known was Lehi’s attempted
collaboration with the Italian fascists. In its nearly concluded ‘Jerusalem
Agreement’ of late 1940, Lehi would help the fascists win the war, and in
return the fascists would uproot any Jewish communities not in Palestine and
force their populations to Palestine.
If this sounds like a scheme so extreme that only fanatical Lehi could have
conjured it, it is essentially what the Israeli state ultimately succeeded at
in the early 1950s—most catastrophically, when it conducted a false-flag terror
campaign against Jews in Iraq to destroy that ancient community and move its
population to Israel as ethnic fodder.
Violence targeting Jews was, and I would argue remains, a core tactic of
Zionism. In fact, the single most deadly terror attack of the entire Mandate
period was not the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946 as is commonly
thought. Even some of the Irgun’s bombings of Palestinian markets killed more
people than the King David attack. But the most deadly single terror attack was
the Jewish Agency’s bombing of the immigrant ship Patria in 1940, killing an
estimated 267 people, of whom more than 200 were Jews fleeing the Nazis.
The Jewish Agency bombed the Patria because it was bringing the DPs to
Mauritius, where the British had facilities for them. The Agency needed the DPs
to be settlers in Palestine without delay, and was willing to risk the lives of
all aboard in order to get the survivors to remain—which, indeed, they did.
In further violence against its Jewish victims, the Agency framed the dead for
the bombing. It spread the lie that the DPs themselves blew up the vessel, that
they committed mass suicide rather than not go directly to Palestine,
posthumously conscripting the dead to serve the Zionist myth.
This was no aberration, but the driving principle of the Zionist project:
Persecuted Jews served the political project, not the other way around.
Another major tactic of violence against Jews by the Jewish Agency and American
Zionist leadership was the sabotaging of safe haven in order to force them to
Palestine. As but one example, in 1944 US Zionist leaders sabotaged President
Roosevelt’s provisional success in establishing a half million new homes for
European DPs, most of these homes in the United States and Britain. When
Roosevelt’s aide Morris Ernst visited the Zionist leaders in an attempt to save
the program, he was, in his words, “thrown out of parlours and accused of
treason”— ‘treason’, because he was Jewish, and the Zionists owned Jews.
Nor were those already settled safe. In 1946, the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of
Palestine, Yitzhak Herzog, conducted a massive kidnapping operation of Jewish
orphans that had been adopted by European families when their parents perished
years earlier. Removing ten thousand children from their homes was the number
he cited to the NY Times as his goal. In the National Archives, I found a copy
of his own record of the trip.
Herzog railed against the fierce resistance he met in every country by
horrified local Jewish leaders who tried to protect the children. But Herzog
used his political clout to circumvent them. In France, for example, facing the
steadfast refusal of the Jewish leaders to betray the children, Herzog
met the Prime Minister of France from whom I demanded promulgation of a law
which would oblige every family to declare the particulars of the children it
houses,
so that those of Jewish background could be exposed and put back in orphanages
until they can be shipped to Palestine—quite a Kafkaesque twist on Passover for
these children who had just been spared the Nazis.
Herzog’s justification for the kidnappings was that for a Jew to be raised in a
non-Jewish home is “much worse than physical murder”. Yet even this ghastly
justification fails to explain what was actually taking place, because at the
same time Herzog was ‘rescuing’ Jewish orphans from this fate “much worse than
physical murder”, his Jewish Agency colleagues were sabotaging Jewish adoptive
homes in England for young survivors still in the camps. The real reason for
all of it, of course, was that the children were needed to serve the settler
project as demographic fodder.
To that end, the Jewish Agency had coerced President Truman to segregate Jewish
DPs into Zionist indoctrination camps, despite objections that it echoed Nazi
behaviour. For these people who had just survived the unthinkable, then severed
from the rest of humanity into these brainwashing camps, there was no such
thing as free thought.
The camps nurtured such fanaticism that it shocked a joint US-UK committee that
visited in 1946. Before these camps, few DPs wanted to go to Palestine. But now
the Committee found them in a delirious state, threatening mass suicide if they
did not go to Palestine. Suggestions of new homes in the United States, which
had always been the favored destination, were again met with threats of mass
suicide.
DPs were also groomed to bring Zionist terrorism to Europe, bombing Allied
trains and Allied facilities. The bombing of the British embassy in Rome in
1946, for example, was by DPs brainwashed in these camps, as was a
near-catastrophe in the Austrian Alps in 1947 when DPs nearly blew a train off
a steep trestle into a deep abyss, which would almost certainly have sent its
two hundred civilians and Allied troops to their deaths.
German Jewish immigrants to Palestine during war were outraged by the Zionists’
exploitation of the Nazi horrors they had just fled. This outrage given voice
by, among others, the prominent journalist Robert Weltsch, editor of Berlin
newspaper until banned by the Nazis in 1938.
Weltsch warned that Zionist leaders
have not yet understood that the enemy seeks the destruction of the Jews … We
who have been here only a few years, we know what Nazism is.
Zionists, rather, are “taking part in the crash of European Jewry only as
spectators”, fighting the British and keeping Jews from joining the Allied
struggle while getting comfortable and rich from their political project in
Palestine. Recent immigrants from Germany and Central Europe, he said, have no
representation among the Zionist ruling establishment. If they did,
we would have demanded that the Yishuv should put itself at the disposal of
Britain for the fight against Hitler and Nazism.
But—and I am still quoting Weltsch—
They do not want to fight against Hitler because his fascist methods are also
theirs … They do not want our young men to join the [Allied] Forces … day after
day they are sabotaging the English War Effort.
These German Jewish immigrants were shunned by the Zionists, their publications
and presses bombed. Even Kiosks were bombed for selling non-Hebrew papers to
German Jewish immigrants.
In 1943, a man whom British records describe as “a Jew whose integrity is not
open to question” risked his life to warn the British about the threat of
Zionism. For his safety, he was referred to only by the code-name ‘Z’.
Z described Zionism as a parallel movement to Nazism. He warned that the
Zionist indoctrination of Jewish youth was producing a society of extremists
who will use any method necessary to achieve Zionist goals; and he pointed out
that, as fascism in Europe has demonstrated, such a society is very difficult
to undo once it has taken root. The result, I’m afraid, is what we, or more
accurately the Palestinians, are facing today in the so-called ‘conflict’.
How trustworthy is this anonymous testimony? I found at the National Archives a
private letter in which Z is identified — he was J.S. Bentwich, the Senior
Inspector of Jewish Schools in Palestine.
Zionists
would have got further towards rescuing the unfortunates in Axis Europe, had
they not complicated the question by always dragging Palestine into the picture
—so judged a report by US Intelligence in the Middle East, dated the 4th of
June, 1943, entitled “Latest Aspects of the Palestine Zionist-Arab Problem”. It
described “Zionism in Palestine” as
a type of nationalism which in any other country would be stigmatised as
retrograde Nazism,
and stated that anti-Semitism was essential to it. Whereas
assimilated Jews in Europe and America are noted for being … stout opponents of
racialism and discrimination,
Zionism has bred the opposite mentality in Palestine,
a spirit closely akin to Nazism, namely, an attempt to regiment the community,
even by force, and to resort to force to get what they want.
US intelligence assailed “the crude conception” being spread of the Palestinian
people as “a nomad tent-dweller … with a little seasonal agriculture”, as being
“too absurd to need refutation”. The report noted the irony that it was from
them that Zionist settlers learned the cultivation of Jaffa oranges. Whereas
the Palestinians were self-sufficient, the Zionist settlements exist on massive
external financing, and should Jews overseas ever tire of supporting the
settlers, “the venture will collapse like a pricked balloon”. The conclusion of
this early US intelligence report was however naïve, or at least premature: now
that the world “has seen the lengths to which the Nazi creed has carried the
nations”, it reasoned that the Zionists “are due to find themselves an
anachronism”.
After the war, the Jewish Agency discussed its enemies. They were democracy;
the Atlantic Charter, which of course became the basis for the United Nations;
Reconstruction; and the fall in anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism having always been
Zionism’s drug, without which it would be irrelevant. The Agency sought to
exploit anti-Semitism and blamed declining anti-Semitism in the United States
on America’s so-called “democratic attitude”.
Nor was this merely a post-war abuse. Even as Jews were still being carted off
to the death camps, the New Zionist Organization’s Arieh Altman was typical in
arguing that anti-Semitism must “form the foundation of Zionist propaganda”,
and the Defence Security Officer in Palestine, Henry Hunloke, reported that it
was important for the Jewish Agency to “stir up anti-Semitism … in order to
force Jews … to come to Palestine”.
Now, today, when anything approaching this topic is raised, it is twisted by
some into the pejorative misstatement that the speaker—in this case, me—is
blaming Jews for anti-Semitism.
NO. Rather, it is the simple fact that Zionism requires anti-Semitism, is
addicted to it, and seeks to insure that it, or at least the appearance of it,
never ends. One need look no further than the satisfaction among many Zionists
today at the true anti-Semitism of the incoming US administration of Donald
Trump, with Israeli journalists like Yaron London openly applauding this
anti-Semitism as welcome news. More about that in a few minutes.
I also mentioned Reconstruction. As one former settlement member, a man named
Newton, explained, Zionist leaders were afraid that with the improvement of
conditions in Europe the pressure on Palestine would subside. Any improvement
in Europe was an anathema to their plans.
The ethnic cleansing of Jaffa, 1948, as survivors are rescued by boats.
Photographer unknown.
What was the Jewish Agency’s reaction to Britain’s role in defeating the worst
enemy Jewry has ever known? It saw an opportunity for extortion. The war had
devastated Britain’s economy; but when Britain turned to the US for a long term
loan to recuperate from its battle against the Nazis, the Agency tried to
pressure Washington to deny the loan unless Britain acceded to Zionist demands.
The loan was of course ultimately approved, but still in 1948 Zionists assailed
US Congressmen for being pro- Marshall Plan, and the Truman administration
itself dangled the loan in front of British officials when they tried to bring
attention to Zionist atrocities.
By 1946, Zionist terrorism had become the defining daily challenge of life in
Palestine, and one hundred thousand British troops proved unable to contain it.
Anyone or anything that kept Palestine a functioning society was a target of
the Zionists. Trains, roads, bridges, communications, oil facilities, and Coast
Guard stations were constantly being bombed. Utility workers, telephone
repairmen, railway workers, bomb disposal personnel were murdered. Police were
long a favoured target and were gunned down by the dozens.
Among the smaller terror organizations that popped up was one specifically
dedicated to Zionists’ long-running fear of Jews befriending non-Jews, the
ultimate fear of course being polluting what for the Zionists was the pure
Jewish race. As a sample of its methods, the terror group doused a disobedient
Jewish girl with acid, severely injuring her and blinding her in one eye.
Zionist terror was aided by the Jewish Agency’s phenomenal intelligence
network. The Agency had informers all the way to high-placed sympathetic US
officials that fed them intelligence, such that the British learned not even to
trust direct messages to US President Truman.
When the UN’s Palestine committee, UNSCOP, visited Palestine in the summer of
1947, the Agency had replaced the committee members’ drivers with spies; had
replaced the waiters at the main restaurant they frequented with spies; and
most productively, sent five young women to serve at what was called a “theatre
network” of house attendants at the building where the members, all men, were
being housed. The young women were required to be smart and educated, but above
all, in the Agency’s word, to be “daring”. Whatever ‘daring’ meant, they
extracted a wealth of information from the key people who were deliberating
Palestine’s future.
Extract from Airborne Field Security, Report No. 54, week ending 19 November
47, regarding Jewish sex workers forced to be Zionist spies. National Archives,
Kew, FCO 141/14286.
Jewish sex workers were involuntarily recruited as spies. They were told that
upon the Zionist victory they would be executed for ‘sleeping with the enemy’,
but might be spared if they cooperated now. The practice was so widespread that
a standard questionnaire was printed up that the women were to fill out after
each British customer. [note: see document detail, above]
To demonstrate the degree to which Jewish Agency plants infiltrated the
government and everyday life, a couple of months after one coast guard station
was attacked and bombed by the Hagana, it blew up again … but the British were
baffled, because this time there had been no attack. They discovered that the
construction crew that had rebuilt the station after the previous attack were
Hagana, and had simply embedded explosives in the reconstruction, to be
detonated when desired.
But the worst problem of infiltration was in the military service, where deadly
sabotage by Zionist plants who had joined the forces led, tragically, to orders
to remove all Jews from service in Palestine, because there was no way to tell
the Zionists from the Jews.
By 1948, this problem spread to key medical personnel. After the Jewish Agency
poisoned the water supply of Acre with typhoid in order to expedite the ethnic
cleansing of this city that lies on the Palestinian side of Partition, the
bacteriologist hired by the British proved to be a Hagana plant or sympathizer,
an obstacle to the availability of the vaccine. [Note: see document detail,
below. For the injection of typhoid into the aqueduct at Acre, see e.g., Ilan
Pappé, Ethnic Cleansing, pp 100-101, and Naeim Giladi, Ben Gurion’s Scandals,
pp 10-11]
Hagana biological warfare and the “obstructive” attitude of the bacteriologist.
Extract from telegram No. 1293, from High Commissioner Cunningham, “dispatched
1900 hrs. 8.5.48”, marked “IMMEDIATE. SECRET”. National Archives, Kew, WO
275/79.
Selling terror required effective marketing, and for that the Agency harnessed
the plight of European Jews at the same time it was exploiting them. A very
brief look at the iconic Zionist immigrant story is illustrative—that is of
course the USS Warfield, renamed the Exodus for the obvious Biblical
iconography.
The Exodus was sold to the world as the desperate attempt of 4,515 Holocaust
survivors to reach their last hope of safety and a new life, their promised
land. The British, instead, forced them back, not just to Europe, but to their
ultimate nightmare: Germany.
That was the story the US and European public got.
In truth, the Exodus was a monstrous propaganda event, grand theatre, not for
benefit but at the expense of Jewish survivors. The Jewish Agency knew that
Exodus passengers would be turned back, for, among other reasons, their
flooding of Palestine with settlers was a tactic to force its political goals.
And remember that the entire Exodus cargo of immigrants equalled less than one
percent of President Roosevelt’s resettlement plan that the Zionists sabotaged.
The DPs themselves were products of the Zionist camps and had been rehearsed to
repeat, as one witness described it, whatever Zionist mumbo-jumbo was demanded
of them.
As for the return to Germany, it was the Jewish Agency, not the British, that
forced the DPs back to Germany. Attempts were being made to find new homes for
the Exodus passengers elsewhere—Denmark was one possibility—but this was
sabotaged by Ben-Gurion, because it would spoil the Exodus plot.
There was in fact already an alternative to Germany. All the Exodus DPs had the
right to disembark in Southern France rather than Germany, but the Agency used
violence to prevent them from leaving. The Exodus show required the pathetic
spectacle of their forced return to Germany.
The British decided to call the Agency’s bluff. They visited Golda Meir (then
Meyerson), and spoke as though it went without saying that the Agency would do
anything to spare the DPs the horrific return to Germany. They said that
perhaps the DPs do not realize that they are free to disembark in southern
France if they wish, or do not believe the British, and suggested that the
Agency send a representative to tell them. Meir refused. To paraphrase Israeli
Professor Idith Zertal, the greater the suffering of these survivors of the
Holocaust, the greater their political and media effectiveness for the Zionists.
A few months after the Exodus affair, the UN recommended partition, with the
assumption that a Zionist state would follow. This decision was directly
influenced by the certainty of continuing Zionist terror if they did not, as
was the disproportionately large land area the UN gave the Zionists.
According to British Cabinet papers, giving the Zionists so much land up front
was an attempt to delay the Zionists’ expansionist wars. They knew they
couldn’t stop Israeli expansionism, but they hoped to delay it. This
appeasement of course failed: within a few months of Resolution 181, the
Zionist armies were already waging their first expansionist war, confiscating
more than half of the Palestinian side of Partition.
But in a consummately Orwellian irony, the fact that the British were occupying
Palestine enabled Zionist leaders to juxtapose their settler project as a
liberation movement against British colonizers, and thus for their 1948 terror
campaign of expropriation and ethnic cleansing to be spun instead as a war of
‘independence’ or ‘emancipation’.
This so-called war of independence was in truth, to quote the British High
Commissioner at the time, “operations based on the mortaring of terrified women
and children”. Its broadcasts boasting of their successes, “both in content and
in manner of delivery, are remarkably like those of Nazi Germany”. The Zionists
were “jubilant” he reported, with “their campaign of calculated aggression
coupled with brutality”.
British intelligence, meanwhile, reported that “the internal machinery of the
Jewish State and all the equipment of a totalitarian regime is complete,
including a Custodian of Enemy Property to handle Arab lands”.
In the Yishuv itself, “persecution of Christian Jews”, by which I assume they
meant converts, “and others who offend against national discipline has shown a
marked increase and in some cases has reached mediaeval standards”.
All this, to be sure, was before any Arab resistance.
Finally, on the 15th of May, 1948, Britain fled the scene of its crime, for
which the Palestinians have been paying ever since. The post-statehood period
continued full throttle with the same violent messianic goals, evolving with
the new dynamics.
Now, there is no point in my having taken up your time here, no point any tree
wasting its paper on this book, unless I thought that it had some value in the
collective effort toward ending the conflict. So … How do I think that this
book, how do I think my approach, might be constructive?
The historical record makes plain what should already have been obvious from
the present reality—that Israel’s and Zionism’s pretenses regarding Jews and
Judaism, and in particular its pretense of being a response to anti-Semitism
and Jewish persecution, is a fraud. Indeed quite the opposite, it thrives by
exacerbating and capitalizing on these, and has turned them into a cynical,
deadly business.
Exposing this, in my opinion, is Israel’s—and the conflict’s—Achilles Heel. And
this should be a simple case of the Emperor’s New Clothes—except that every
time the child points out that the Emperor is naked, he or she is labelled an
anti-Semite and silenced.
The IDF attacks the area between the ‘Azza and Aida refugee camps, Bethlehem,
as an ambulance (center, background) tries to rescue victims. December, 2015.
Photo: T Suárez
The US and other governments empower the conflict for their own geopolitical
reasons, but why do the publics of those allegedly democratic countries give
their tacit acquiescence?
Israel has one of the world’s largest militaries, but its most powerful weapon,
the one without which all its others would be impotent, is its Narrative, its
creation myth, its auto-biography.
Under the Twilight Zone of this Narrative, Israel is not merely a political
entity like any other nation-state, but is transformed into the Old Testament
kingdom whose name it adopted for that strategic purpose, striking a powerful
chord in the collective Western sub-conscious.
We all know the Narrative more or less, but in order for that Narrative to be
ever-present, Israel has crammed it into a 3-word mantra: ‘The Jewish State’.
This phrase—Israel’s self-identity—is a unique construct in the modern world.
It is qualitatively distinct from any other country’s relationship with any
other religion or cultural group. Judaism is not Israel’s state religion in the
sense of a national faith that any nation might adopt. Rather, it presents
itself as THE Jewish state, the metaphysical embodiment of Jewry itself, of
Judaism, Jewish history, culture, persecution, and most cynical and
exploitative of all, the Holocaust.
No country claims it is the Catholic state. Costa Rica, for example, is a
Catholic state; it does not suggest that it owns Catholicism, Catholics, or
historic Christian martyrdom. We do not have the British government issuing
guidelines as to when criticism of the Costa Rican government becomes
anti-Catholic hate speech. Norway is a Lutheran state; Tunisia is one of
several nations that maintains Islam as a national faith; Cambodia is a
Buddhist state. Israel, in contrast, would never acknowledge even the
possibility of another Jewish state because it has body-snatched everything
Jewish, and holds it hostage to empower its crimes.
Criticise Israeli terror, you will instead hit this three-word human
shield—‘The Jewish State’— that Israel hides behind.
What other country on this earth is permitted this perverse tribal claim over a
religious or cultural group? This self-proclaimed exceptionalism should strike
us as bizarre—even weird—yet we continue to be party to it.
We hear a lot about anti-Semitism these days, and there is of course
anti-Semitism in the world, as there are all varieties of bigotry. But let’s
just blurt out the obvious: Virtually all of the alleged anti-Semitism we hear
about from the Zionists is a lie, smears calculated to silence anyone who seeks
to end the horror.
This smear campaign has been compared to the McCarthy witch hunt of the 1950s,
but it is in truth much worse, because whereas Communism is merely a political
and economic theory that one can argue for or against, anti-Semitism is
inherently evil. In other words, with McCarthyism, one could ultimately respond
by saying, Well, let’s say I am a communist, so what?
Zionism’s abuse of anti-Semitism, its exploitation of Judaism and historic
Jewish persecution for immoral ends, is profoundly anti-Semitic. Zionism, taken
at its word, makes Judaism complicit in its crimes, and thus—taken at its
word—succeeds where all the conventional bigots throughout the centuries were
powerless.
Meanwhile, as we are seeing more bluntly than ever in the United States, true
anti-Semitism is embraced by Zionists because it is invariably pro-Israel.
One hundred years ago, MP Edwin Montagu accused the British government of
anti-Semitism for colluding with the Zionists. History has proven him correct.
If Israel is forced to stop this anti-Semitic abuse, if it is forced to come
out from hiding behind its human shield, the conflict will be seen for what it
is and so could not continue. Israel-Palestine will become a democratic,
secular country of equals.
And what more poetic year than the Balfour centennial for that to happen.
Thank you.