Alan Hart

On 14 May 1948, the Zionist state of Israel declared itself to be in existence. Before and after that event 60 years ago, many of the Arabs of Palestine were dispossessed of their land and their rights, and the Palestinian refugee problem was created. How, really, did it happen? (The essence as summarised below gives due prominence to the statements of Zionism’s own leaders)

The birthplace of Israel’s founding father was the small Polish factory town of Plonsk, about 38 miles from Warsaw. He was born David Green, the son of a lawyer, in 1886. He arrived in Palestine from his Polish homeland in 1906 as a Russian tourist on a three-month visa and, in his own words, he“simply overstayed.”

On his first visit to Jerusalem, and reflecting the fact that the small number of Jews then in Palestine were from many homelands, he described the Holy City as a “Tower of Babel“, with Jews “speaking to each other in 40different languages, half of them unable to communicate with the other half.”

As David Ben-Gurion he was Israel’s first and long-serving prime minister and minister of defense.

In 1937, and as he recorded in his diary, Ben-Gurion wrote a letter to his son. In it he said: “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as war.”

The founding father of Israel’s army was Vladimir Jabotinsky. He was a Russian Jew, born in Odessain 1880. In 1923 he published The Iron Wall,which became the main inspirational text for all Jewish nationalists who committed themselves to Zionism’s colonial enterprise. Its purpose was to take for keeping the maximum amount of Arab land with the minimum number of Arabs on it. In The Iron Wall, Jabotinsky was brutally frank about what Zionism’s ethic had to be. He wrote this:

“Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore itstands or falls by the question of armed force. There is no other ethic. It is important to speak Hebrew but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot – or else I am through with playing at colonization. To the hackneyed reproach that this point of view is unethical, I answer – absolutely untrue. As long as there is the faintest spark of hope for the Arabs to impede us, they will not sell these hopes – not for any tasty morsel because this is not a rabble but a people, a living people.And no people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions,except when there is no hope left, until we have removed every opening visible in the Iron Wall”. (Emphasis added).

The need for most if not all of Palestine’s Arabs to be dispossessed of their land and their rights had, in fact, been recognised and accepted by Zionism’s founding father, Theodore Herzl.A Hungarian-born Jew who worked as a journalist and playwright in Vienna, Herzl convened the first Congress of the World Zionist Organisation at Basel in Switzerland in 1897. It ended with Zionism’s first public statement of its mission. It was “to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine.” The term “home” was used because the Zionists did not want the world to know their real intention – to create a sovereign state. What Herzl really thought at the time was confined to his diary, which was not made public, published, until 1960. His diary entry for 3 September 1897 included the following:

“Were I to sum up the BaselCongress in a word – which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly- it would be this: At BaselI founded the JewishSTATE. Perhaps in five years, and certainly 50, everyone will know it… At Basel, then, I created this abstraction which, as such, is invisible to the vast majority of people.”(Emphasis added).

Herzl also confided to his diary his vision of what would have to happen to the Palestinian Arabs:

“We shall have to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries while denying it any employment in our own country… Both the process of expropriation(of Arab land)and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” (Emphasis added).

In 1940, when Nazi persecution of Europe’s Jews was turning to extermination, Joseph Weitz, the head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonisation Department in Palestine, wrote a secret memorandum headed A Solution to the (Jewish) Refugee Problem. In it he said:

“It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country. We shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in this country. There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighbouring countries – all of them. Not one village, not one tribe, should be left!” (Emphasis added).

“Transfer” was and is Zionism’s euphemism for ethnic cleansing.

It was Arthur James Balfour, the foreign minister in Britain’s wartime coalition government, and before that prime minister, who gave Zionism’s colonial enterprise a degree of spurious legitimacy. He did it in a note addressed to Baron Lionel Rothschild on 2 November 1917. The Balfour Declaration (as it became known) was in part a response to the personal pleading and lobbying of Dr. Chaim Weizmann,who had become the leader of the World Zionist Organisation after Herzl’s premature death. The document said:

“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 may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” (Emphasis added).

Palestine at the time was controlled by Turkey, and Britain hadno right of any kind to give Palestine away, in whole or in part, to anybody. In 1957 an article in the American Bar Association Journalby Sol Linowitz (who was to become an adviser to, and negotiator for, President Carter) concluded that the Balfour Declaration was “legally impotent“.

The Balfour Declaration concealed from public view a reality which, if it had been acknowledged, would have invited the conclusion that catastrophe was bound to be the outcome if Zionism was allowed to have its way. The concealed reality was the make-up of the population of Palestine.At the moment the Balfour Declaration was issued, the Arabs numbered about 670,000and constituted 93 percentof the population. Jews then in Palestine numbered about 60,000and constituted seven percentof the population. The term “Arab” or “Arabs” did not appear in the Balfour Declaration. As we have seen, it reduced the 93 percent Arab majority to “existing non-Jewish communities.”

In the House of Commons in July 1937, Winston Churchill, (then excluded from office and campaigning for the Hitler threat to be taken seriously), gave an explanation of whythe Balfour Declaration was issued. He said:

“It is a delusion to suppose this was a mere act of crusading enthusiasm or quixotic philanthropy. On the contrary, it was a measure taken… in due need of the warwith the object of promoting the general victory of the Allies, for which weexpected andreceived valued and importantassistance.” (Emphasis added).

The clear implication of those words is that in November 1917Britain had needed the Zionists and their influence and had been prepared to pay the price they asked for it.

There is not space in this shortish article to go into the documented detail of whatassistance Britain needed from Zionism and whereit was needed. But the following can be said in summary.

In November 1917, Britain was facing the prospect ofdefeat in World War I.The Admiralty had warned that Britain might have to surrender. To stave off any prospect of defeat, Britain needed Zionism’s influence in revolutionary Russiaand America. The Zionists were expected to use their influence to keep Russia(Britain’s ally) in the war and, also, to prevent a complete communist takeover (of Russia); and the Zionists were expected to use their influence to bring America into the war,and to see that, against the clock, the money was available to fund the upgrading and expansion of America’s war machine.

And there were two other factors at work.

British policy makers believed that the establishment of a Zionist state in the Arab heartland would assist Britain’s control of the region by, among other things, keeping the Arabs dividedabout how to deal with it.

It was also the case that Britain’s leaders, the anti-Semitic Balfour in particular, did not want any more Jews in Britain. From 1881, because of poverty and persecution including pogroms, Jews had been streaming out of their Tsarist Russian homeland in search of a better life in America and Western Europe. Senior figures in Britain’s Conservative establishment feared, as did Britain’s long settled Jews, that an influx of more Jews might provoke anti-Semitism.

When, with the the help of the Arabs it was intending to betray, Britain defeated Turkey and occupied Palestine, it was in a position to give substance to the Balfour Declaration. But what substance? Balfour spelled it out in a memorandum he prepared on 11 August 1919 for the Paris Peace Conference. It said:

“In Palestine we do not propose even togo through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country…. The four great powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes,of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”(Emphasis added).

Twenty years later, and shortly after the British occupation forces had put down a full-scale Arab rebellion and destroyed the Palestinian leadership, Balfour’s policy was repudiatedby a committee whose members included the Lord Chancellor, Vincent Caldecot.The committee investigated Britain’s promises to the Arabs, and the Lord Chancellor was privately appalled by the British duplicity the committee uncovered. Its unanimous report was issued on 11 March 1939. It said:

“His Majesty’s Government wasnot free to dispose of Palestine without regard for the wishes and interests of the inhabitants of Palestine.” (Emphasis added).

Six weeks later, in the countdown to World War II, and terrified by the prospect of the Arabs throwing in their lot with Nazi Germany on the basis that the enemy of their enemy was their friend, the British government unveiled a White Paper setting out its new policyfor Palestine. It said:

“His Majesty’s Government therefore now declare unequivocally that it isnot part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish state.”(Emphasis added)

In a most explicit way that left no scope for misunderstanding by anybody, and no opportunity for misrepresentation by Zionism, the White Paper spelled out what Britain’s Palestine policy was to be from here on.

The objective was “an independent Palestinian state within 10 years,”in which “Arabs and Jews could share in such a way as to ensure that the essential interests of each are safeguarded.”

As a concession to the Zionists, the White Paper also stated that Britain would permit a total of 75,000more Jews to enter Palestine over the next five years, which would take the Jewish population of Palestine to approximately one-third. But after five years Britain was not intending to allow any more Jews to enter Palestine without the consent of the Arabs.Since it was predictable that the Arabs would not agree to further Jewish immigration, the 1939 White Paper was effectively announcing the end of it after five years.

In addition the White Paper pledged that Britain would check the ever-increasing illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine; and that the British High Commissioner would be given powers to regulate the sale and transfer of land.

Zionism rejected the White Paper and accused Britain of betraying the Jews. Ben-Gurion himself declared:

“We will fight with the British against Hitler as if there was no White Paper; and fight the White Paper as if there were no war.

What was about to happen in Palestine, and much of what is still happening today, was determined more than anything else by what happened in Europe – the slaughter of six million Jews.

Prior to the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust, Zionism’s prospects for creating a state for Jews in Palestine were not good. They were even poor. And that was due in large part to the fact that very many Jews of the world, particularly the most informed and thoughtful of them, were opposed to Zionism’s colonial enterprise. They believed it to be morally wrong. They believed it would lead to unending conflict. And they feared that if Zionism had its way, it would one day provoke anti-Semitismwhich could threaten the well-being and perhaps even the survival of Jews everywhere.

Also documented is the fact that very many of the Jews who were displaced and uprooted in Nazi occupied Europe and needed refuge elsewhere did not want to go to Palestine.Their preference was America.

- President Roosevelt did, in fact, seek to organise a rescue plan which he hoped would allow up to half a million European refugees, Jews and others, into America, Britain and elsewhere. But this initiative was killed by the Zionist lobby, a victory that was due in large part to the fact that many of America’s settled Jews, like their English counterparts in an earlier time, did not want the arrival of too many more Jewish immigrants.

- After Roosevelt’s death in office, President Truman also tried to get a rescue plan going, but again because of the Zionist lobby’s influence, it didn’t get the necessary support in Congress.

Zionism didn’t want European Jewish refugees anywhere but in Palestine, where they were to be a battering ram for the creation of the Zionist state.

In Volume One of my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, there is a chapter headed Holocaust – Jewish Death, Zionist Life. It wasthe obscenity of the Nazi holocaust that gave Zionism everything it needed to proceed with confidence and self-righteousness. Everything included the emotional and political support of most if not all of world Jewry, and, in due course, the money, much of it from America, to buy the weapons with which to fight and defeat Arab armies, all of them if necessary. But Zionism’s first strategic priority was to get British forces out of Palestine.

One Zionist initiative for bringing this about was a proposal for an alliance with Nazi Germany. The proposer was Avraham Stern. He arrived in Palestine from his Polish homeland in 1925. He was one of the founder members of the Irgun(formally the National Military Organisation or NMO). It was to become Zionism’s most successful terrorist organisation; but Stern broke with it to form his own group which was best known as the Stern Gang.

In September 1940, Stern approached Mussolini’s Italian Fascists for a deal with them. When they were not interested, he turned to the Nazis. In Janury 1941, Stern met with two important Nazis. One of them was Otto von Hentig, the head of the Oriental Department of Nazi Germany’s foreign office. The outcome of the discussions was a proposal, in writing, dated 11 January 1941,from Stern.The text of the proposal said, in part, the following (emphasis added):

“The establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarianbasis, and bound by treaty with with the German Reich, would be in the interest ofa maintained and strengthened future German position of power in the Near East.

“Proceeding from these considerations, the NMO in Palestine, under the condition of the above mentioned national aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are recognised on the side of the German Reich, offers to actively take part in the war on Germany’s side.

“This offer by the NMO… would beconnected to the military training and organising of Jewish manpower in Europe, under the leadership and command of the NMO.These military units would take part in the fight to conquer Palestine, should such a front be decided upon.

“The indirect participation of the Israeli freedom movement in the New Order in Europe, already in the preparatory stage, would be linked with a positive solution of the European Jewish problem in conformity with the above mentioned aspirations of the Jewish people. This would extraordinarily strengthen the moral basis of the New Order in the eyes of all humanity.”

Stern was assassinated by British special forces in 1942.

Forty-five years later, Yehoshafat Harkabi, Israel’s longest serving director of Military Intelligence, offered an observation on this Zionist attempt to do business with Hitler’s Germany:

“Perhaps, for peace of mind, we ought to see this affair as an aberrant episode in Jewish history. Nevertheless,it should alert us to how far extremists may go in times of distress, and where their manias may lead.”(Emphasis added).

It was another Jewish immigrant from Poland, Menachem Begin, who turned the Irgun into a most successful terrorist organisation. The same Menachem Begin who, in 1977, would become Israel’s prime minister and speed up the illegal settlement of the occupied West Bank, in order to deny the Palestinians any prospect of sufficient land for a viable independent state of their own, or so he hoped.

While he was re-structuring and re-focusing the Irgun, Begin had a message for the Gentiles of the world, and the British in particular:

“Lest they be unwilling to realise, or all too ready to overlook, the fact is that out of blood and fire and tears and ashes, a new specimen of human being was born, a new specimen completely unknown to the world for over eighteen hundred years, the FIGHTING JEW. That Jew, who the world considered dead and buried and never to rise again, has risen… never again to go down the sides of the pit and vanish off the earth.”

In Cairoon 6 November 1944, two representatives of this “new specimen of human being” assassinated Lord Moyne, Britain’s Resident Minister for the Middle East. In the House of Commons, Churchill responded with these words:

“If our dreams for Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins’ guns and our labours for its future produce only a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany,then many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained so consistently and so long in the past.” (Emphasis added).

In Palestine the Irgun concentrated on bombing British installations, facilities and communications networks of all kinds, for the purpose of making government impossible. The blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946 was the most spectacular and politically important of the Irgun’s operations against the occupying British. They had taken over the southern wing of this most prestigious hotel to house the central institutions of their administration. It was the very heart of British authority and power in Palestine. Ben-Gurion denied that he or Zionism’s official military organisations – the Haganah and the Palmach – had anything do with, or advance knowledge of, the blowing up of the King David.. He was not telling the truth. At least 91 people were killed and twice that number were injured. And Britain was humiliated.

So, having made a mess of it, Britain decided to get out of Palestine by midnight on 13 May 1948; and it dumped the problem of what to do about Palestine into the lap of infant United Nations. Zionist terrorism had succeeded in its mission to break Britain’s will to stay.

On 20 November 1947, at the end of a voting process that was influenced by the Zionist lobby, the General Assembly of the UN approved by a narrow majority a resolution, number 181, to partition Palestine. It was a proposal for injustice on a massive scale. IFit was approved by the Security Council, 56.4percent of Palestine was to be given for a Jewish state to people – many of them recently arrived, alien immigrants with no biological connection to the ancient Hebrews- who constituted 33percent of the population and owned 5.6percent of the land.

But the bare facts abut the Partition Plan proposal itself tell only a fraction of this part of the truth of history.

Without the consent of the majority of the people of Palestine, the UNdid not have the rightto decide to partition Palestine or assign any part of its territory to a minority of alien immigrants in order for them to establish a state of their own.

Even so, the partition plan proposal approved by the General Assembly did NOTbecome UN policybecause it did NOT go to the Security Council for approval- because the US believed that, if approved in the face of Arab and other Muslim opposition. it could only be implemented by force; andPresident Truman was NOT prepared to use force to partition Palestine.

So the partition plan was vitiated, becameinvalid,and the question of what to do about Palestine was taken back to the General Assembly for more discussion. The option favoured and proposed by the US was temporary UN Trusteeship. It was while the General Assembly was debating what do that Israel UNILATERALLY declared itself to be in existence – actually in defiance of the will of the organised international community, including the Truman administration.

Zionism’s assertion that Israel was given its birth certificate and thus its legitimacy by the UN Partition Plan is a myth. Propaganda nonsense. The truth of the time was that the Zionist state of Israel had no right to exist andcould have no right to exist unless….. Unless it was recognised and legitimizedby those who were dispossessed of their land and their rights during its creation. In international law only the Palestinians could give Israel the legitimacy it craved. And that legitimacy was the only thing the Zionists could not take from the Palestinians by force.

The Arabs were not only the overwhelming majorityin the territory to be allotted to them by the Partition Plan proposal, they were also about 40 percentof the population in the territory to be allotted to the Jews. For Ben-Gurion and his most senior leadership colleagues, this gave added urgency to their task of finalising the plan – Plan Dalet- to ethnically cleanse, de-Arabise, as much as Palestine as possible.

According to Zionism’s version of history, most if not all of the 800,000Arabs who took their leave of Palestine in the months before and after Israel’s declaration of independence left voluntarily, in response to a call from Arab leaders to make way and leave a clear field of fire for incoming Arab armies. In his latest book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Professor Ilan Pappe,Israel’s leading “revisionist” (which means honest) historian, describes this version of history, Israel’s foundational myth, as“a sheer fabrication.”He documents the planning and implementation of Zionism’s ethnic cleansing policy – a systematic reign of terror which, from December 1947 to January 1949, included 31 massacres.

The massacre at the the Arab village of Deir Yassinon 9 April 1947, was correctly described by Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian-Jewish writer, as “the psychologically decisive factor in the spectacular exodus of the Arabs from the Holy Land and the creation of the Palestinan refugee problem.”At Deir Yassin,254 Palestinians, including 145 women of whom 35 were pregnant, were butchered. Menachem Begin, whose Irgun terrorists led the attack with assistance from the Stern Gang, was later to write this:

“In the rest of the country the Arabs began to flee in terror, even before they clashed with Jewish forces…. The legend of Deir Yassin helped us in particular in the saving of Tiberias and the conquest of Haifa… All the Jewish forces proceeded to advance through Haifa like a knife through butter. The Arabs began fleeing in panic, shouting ‘Deir Yassin!’”(Emphasis added).

On 17 November 1948, Aharon Cizling, Israel’s first minister of agriculture, said the following at a cabinet meeting:

“Now the Jews have behaved like Nazis and my entire being is shaken.”

But having spoken those words, he agreed that the Zionist state’s crimes should be covered up. And they have been for 60 years.

The conclusion invited by honest study of what really happened is that there won’t be, can’t be, a real peace process unless and until enough Israelis, and Jews everywhere, are prepared to acknowledge the terrible wrong done to the Palestinians by Zionism, with the collusion of the major powers.