Canada Palestine Association,
P.O.Box,
1085,
Halifax, NS,
B3J 2X1
Tel: 902
429 9100
902 275 4898
Aug. 28, 2006
The Editor,
The StarPhoenix.
Dear
Editor;
Israel's Apologists Re-write the History.
Dr. Ismail Zayid
Mr. Monte
Keene Pishny-Floyd, in his opinion column,
{"Critics of Israel distort realities" Aug. 25}, indulges in
re-writing the history of the Middle East.
The
atrocious attack on Lebanon destroying its infrastructure and
killing over a thousand innocent civilians, which he
describes as an act of self defence against the
capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah, was clearly planned and executed,
using this pretext. The noted journalist, Seymour Hersh,
reported: "According to a Middle
East expert with knowledge of the current
thinking of both the Israeli and the U.S.
governments, Israel
had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah - and shared it with Bush
Administration officials - well before the July 12th. kidnappings."{ The New Yorker, Aug. 21, 2006.}
He justifies Israel's
legitimacy using the Balfour Declaration and the UNGA Partition resolution # 181.
It was the 2nd of November 1917,
when Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, issued his
infamous declaration in the form of a letter written to an English Jew, Lord Rothchild, it read:
"His Majesty’s
Government view with favour
the establishment in Palestine of a
national home for the Jewish people... it being clearly understood that nothing
shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing
non-Jewish communities in Palestine".
It is interesting to note that the four-letter word "Arab" occurs
not once in this document. To refer to the Arabs who constituted, at the time,
92% of the population of Palestine
and owned 98% of its land, as the non-Jewish communities is not merely
preposterous but deliberately fraudulent. I do not need to tell you that this
letter has no shred of legality, as Palestine
did not belong to Balfour to assume such acts of generosity. The words of the
world- renowned British historian Professor
Arnold Toynbee describe the British role, in issuing this document
accurately:
"We [the British] were taking it upon
ourselves to give away something that was not ours to give. We were promising
rights of some kind in the Palestinian Arabs’ country to a third
party".
Similarly, the well-known Jewish writer, Arthur Koestler,
summed it up aptly when he described the Balfour Declaration as a document in
which "one nation promised a second the country of a third".
On the 29th of November
1947, the U.N. General Assembly passed its Resolution #181, recommending the
partition of Palestine into a Jewish state, in 56% of the land; an Arab state
in 42% of the land; and an International Zone in Jerusalem. At the time, the
Jews, a large proportion of them were recent or illegal immigrants,
constituted 31% of the population of Palestine and owned 5.6% of its land. It is
interesting to note that times have not changed since 1947 and the United States got the General Assembly to delay a
vote "to gain time to bring, by coercion, certain Latin American, Asian
and African countries into line with its own views". Under- Secretary of
State Sumner Welles
stated:
"By direct order of the White House, every form of pressure, direct
and indirect, was used to make sure that the necessary majority would be
gained".
Subsequently, fighting
erupted between Arabs and Jews and by the end of the fighting in early 1949, Israel had occupied 78% of Palestine and approximately 750,000
Palestinians were driven out or fled in terror from their homes.
The genesis of this exodus
emanates from the inherent concept of the Zionist ideology of creating a pure
Jewish state in Palestine, free of Arabs. The current
powerful political agenda that exists in Israel today, as the policy of
"transfer of Palestinians" from Israel and the occupied territories, is
not a new one. Theodor Herzl, the
father of the Zionist movement, wrote in his diaries in 1896:"We shall try to spirit the penniless (Arab)
population across the border....… Both the process of expropriation and
the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly
(from R. Patai, ed., The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, Vol I.)."
Ben Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, in a
letter to his son, Amos, in 1937, confided that when the Jewish state comes
into being, "We will expel the
Arabs and take their places". And while visiting the newly
conquered Nazareth in July, 1948, Ben-Gurion exclaimed: "Why are there so
many Arabs left here? Why didn’t you expel
them?"
The ethnic cleansing of the
palestinians from their
homeland was, accordingly, achieved by a series om
massacres and psychological warfare, including the massacre of Deir Yassin, on april, 9, 1948.
This massacre was not unique and
numerous similar massacres were carried out by Zionist forces and Israeli
forces during that war. A recent article in the Tel Aviv newspaper, Hair, of May 6, 1992, by Guy Erlich,
documents evidence collected by the American Jewish journalist Dan Kortzman, author of Genesis
1948, and the history researcher Ariyeh
Yitzhaki, of at least twenty large massacres of Arabs
and about hundreds more massacres committed by Israeli forces. Yitzhaki states:
"For
many Israelis it was easy to cling to the false claim that the Arabs left the
country because that was what their leaders ordered. That is a total lie. The
fundamental cause for the flight of the Arabs was their fear of Israelis’
violence, and that fear had a basis in reality".
History researcher Uri Milstein, celebrated in Israel as the dispeller of myths, confirms
Yitzhaki’s evaluation regarding the volume of
the massacres and even goes further:
"If
Yitzhaki claims that there were murders in almost
every village, then I say that up to the inception of Israel every event of fighting ended in a
massacre of Arabs. There were massacres of Arabs in all of Israel’s
wars, but I have no doubt that the War of Independence was the dirtiest".
In the village of Duweima, an Arab village near Hebron, occupied without a battle by
Battalion 89 of the 8th Brigade, some 80 - 100 civilians were murdered in cold
blood by the occupiers. Later more civilians were murdered. In the village of Safsaf:
"52
men were tied with a rope. Lowered into a pit and shot.
Ten were killed. Women begged for mercy. Three cases of rape.
A fourteen year old raped and four others killed".
The policy of massacre was
complemented by a campaign of psychological warfare, initiating terror to force
the Palestinians to flee. Leo Heiman, Israeli Army
Reserve officer who fought in 1948, wrote in Marine Corp Gazette in June 1964:
"As
uncontrolled panic spread through all Arab quarters, the Israelis brought up
jeeps with loudspeakers which broadcast recorded ‘horror sounds’.
These included shrieks, wails and anguished moans of Arab women, the wail of
sirens and the clang of fire alarm bells, interrupted by a sepulchral voice
calling out in Arabic: ‘Save your souls all ye faithful: the Jews are
using poison gas and atomic weapons. Run for your lives in the name of Allah’".
.
The claim that the Arab
states invaded Israel in 1948 is questionable. Long
before a single Arab soldier entered Palestine on May
15, 1948,
The Zionist terrorist gangs, the Irgun, the Stern and
Haganah had already driven 350,000 Palestinians
out of their homes and occupied many cities, like Acre and Jaffa, and many towns that were allocated
for the Arab state in the Partition plan. The staement
that the Arab states invaded Israel in 1956,1967,
1973, and 1982, is incredible. The attack on Sinai in 1956 was in a
secret collusion between Israel, the UK and France. In 1967, it was Israel that planned and effected
that war as confirmed in the statements made by Israeli leaders:
Yitzhak
Rabin, chief
of staff of the Israeli army at the time, stated :"
I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to the Sinai would not have been
sufficient to launch an offensive war. He knew it and we knew it." {Le Monde, Feb.28,1968}.
Menachem Begin, a cabinet minister in June 1967,
stated, while prime minister, addressing Israel's National Defence College, on Aug.8,1982,
: " In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations
in the Sinai did not prove Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with our
selves. We decided to attack him" [The
N.Y.Times, Aug.21,1982].
In 1973, Egypt and Syria were attempting to recover their
land illegally occupied in 1967. As to the invasion of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982, the historic
record speaks for itself, including the massacres orchestrated by Ariel Sharon
and his army.
As to the Israeli
democracy that is referred to in relation to the treatment that the Arab
citizens of Israel receive, I will let many of Israeli
intellectuals and thinkers describe that. The noted Israeli author and
journalist, Maxim Ghilan
stated; " Israel is a democrcy
for Jews only, like [Apartheid] South Africa is a democracy for Whites
only." The state of Israel practices blatant
legislated racism and discrimination against its own Muslim and Christian
citizens. These practices have been condemned by all international human
rights bodies, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and
Israeli human rights groups such as B’Tselem.
The catalogue of these practices is lengthy, but the late Professor
Israel Shahak, a Holocaust survivor and
chairman of the Israeli League for Human and Civil
Rights, summed it up accurately in his statement: "It
is my considered opinion that the state of Israel
is a racist state in the full meaning of this term. In this state, people are
discriminated against, in the most permanent and legal way and in the most
important areas of life, only because of their origin. This racist
discrimination began in Zionism and is carried today mainly in co-operation
with the institutions of the Zionist movement." (Quote taken from
The Racist Nature of Zionism and of the Zionist State of Israel, an article
published in Pi-Ha’aton, the weekly
newspaper of the students of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Nov. 5, 1975.)
Derek Tozer, an Israeli thinker,
stated: "The official policy of the government (of Israel)
is unequivocal. Arabs, like the Jews in Nazi Germany, are officially ‘class
B’ citizens, a fact which is recorded on their identity cards."
The predicament of Israel’s roughly 1.2
million Arab citizens is evident, as the 2003 Israeli State Committee
of Inquiry made clear: "They suffer systemic
discrimination in employment, housing and education, and lack of equal access
to state resources."
Israel’s new Citizenship Law,
passed recently by a wide margin in the Knesset, denies any Arab Israeli
citizen the right to reside in Israel
with his/her spouse if they marry a Palestinian. Amnesty International and
Human Rights Watch have condemned the law as racist, and Israel-based B’Tselem human rights group, claims that it
contravenes the Israeli Basic Law.
It is time that Israel
and its apologists come to recognise that only
through a just resolution of this conflict, through compliance with
international law and UN resolutions, can peace and security be assured for
Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East.
Yours sincerely,
Ismail Zayid, MD.
President,
Canada Palestine Association.